I tell you it is no such thing.

For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day; a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength.

It is a disease to be borne with patience, like any other nervous complaint, and to be treated with counter-irritants.

My trip to Mexico will be good for it, but that is not the reason why I must go." Then he told her all his private circumstances; the ruin which the war had brought on him and his family; how, of his two brothers, one had survived the war only to die at home, a mere wreck of disease, privation, and wounds; the other had been shot by his side, and bled slowly to death in his arms during the awful carnage in the Wilderness; how his mother and two sisters were struggling for a bare subsistence on a wretched Virginian farm, and how all his exertions barely kept them from beggary.
"You have no conception of the poverty to which our southern women are reduced since the war," said he; "they are many of them literally without clothes or bread." The fee he should earn by going to Mexico would double his income this year.

Could he refuse?
Had he a right to refuse?
And poor Carrington added, with a groan, that if he alone were in question, he would sooner be shot than go.
Sybil listened with tears in her eyes.