Chapter 60

If I called Berkeley out, and shot him, risking and breaking alike the civil and military laws of the land, I knew that my uncle would forgive, and that Cora would weep for me; I knew how Louisa would nervously shrink from the publicity of such an affair; but I knew also that none of them would forgive me for an alleged liaison with a creature apparently so worthless as the cast-off mistress of another--a liaison by which I lost the love of one so brilliant as the heiress of Chillingham. Of all such transactions, t…