After an interview with Mr. Merriman, Desmond found the courage to put to Phyllis the question which he had not ventured to ask before she left India. What the answer was may be inferred from the fact that Sir Willoughby insisted on the wedding taking place at once. It was time for the return of his old enemy the gout, he said; he was going to Buxton to end his days, and wished to see the Hall in the hands of his heir before he left.

Mr. Burslem, Desmond's old schoolmaster, performed the ceremony, and Clive, though suffering from rheumatism, came down for the occasion. The only familiar form that Desmond missed was that of old Dickon, who had died a few months after Desmond's departure from home.

Desmond settled down for a time at the Hall, cheering his mother's declining years, repaying good for ill to his invalid brother, and winning golden opinions from all his neighbors high and low. He eagerly watched the further career of his old hero, now Lord Clive; learned to admire him as statesman as well as soldier; sympathized with him through all the attacks made upon him; and mourned him sincerely when, in 1774, the great man, preyed upon by an insidious disease, died by his own hand.

Five years later he felt the East calling, bought a commission, and sailed with General Sir Eyre Coote, to take part in the "frantic military exploits," as some one called them, of Warren Hastings against Haidar Ali and Tippu in Mysore. He came home a colonel, and was made a baronet for his services in the war. Finally retiring from public life, he lived for thirty years longer on his estate, happy in the careers of his two sons, who became soldiers like himself. He died, an old man, in the year after Waterloo, at which his eldest grandson, a lieutenant in the guards, behaved with a gallantry that attracted the notice of the Iron Duke.

Visitors to Sir Desmond Burke's house were amused and interested to see a battered wooden stump with an iron hook hanging in a conspicuous place in the hall amid tigers' heads, Indian weapons, and other trophies from the East.

"That?" Sir Desmond would say, in answer to their question. "That belonged to one of the best friends I ever had, a fine old salt named William Bulger. I met him when I was sixteen, and buried him when I was forty: and my wife and I have felt ever since a blank in our lives. If you can put up with an old man's stories, I'll tell you something of what Bulger and I went through together, when I was a youngster with Clive in India."