No; emphatically no - he would not ask Miss Hoskins to marry him - despite her £30,000 a year. He had given his heart to Elizabeth Lawson. What was there to prevent him from marrying her? Surely he was old enough to choose for himself.

Lieutenant-Colonel James Wolfe, aged twenty-three, glared at his mother; for the first time in his heart he felt really angry with her. Then he stalked out of the room, picked up his hat, and left the house, slamming the door behind him.

He had had so many disappointments lately that he cared not what happened to him now, or what he did. Self-respect - no, he assured himself, he had none. But, by nature, Wolfe was not a rake. As a matter of fact, a young man of remarkably strong character, he held in utter contempt the follies and excesses of the age. But now he indulged freely in them, out of mere bravado, just because he felt disgusted with himself and everything.

Then, after four months of reckless license, he returned to Scotland, where he was stationed, worn out, ill in mind and body.

And forthwith, in a fit of remorse, he sat down and penned a letter to his father, begging forgiveness for his recent conduct. "I am very glad," he wrote. ". . . to be able to make some sort of apology for every particular instance of folly that has . . . fallen under your notice. . . .

I believe the first step to amendment is to acknowledge our faults, a proof that we think them faults. This I do very heartily and truly, though I must assert that most of them have arisen from inadvertency and not from any ill intention."

Forgiveness, needless to say, was granted, but the father still remained in bitter opposition to his son's matrimonial project. And Wolfe, of course, a soldier and a soldier's son, could but conform, outwardly at any rate, to his father's wishes.

The boy's outlook on life, therefore, seemed in no way to be bettered. He was still cramped up in Scotland without enough to do to keep him occupied. He was still in love. Moreover, he felt heartily ashamed of himself, and, what is more, had now lost the opportunity of pleasing his parents by marrying Miss Hoskins, because in 1751 that lady had given her heart and fortune to his old friend and schoolmate, John Warde.

Poor Wolfe! The obvious thing for him to have done now, you may say, was to find someone else to fall in love with. But even this he could not do - yet. He remained splendidly loyal to Miss Lawson; yes, although in his heart of hearts he was at last beginning to lose faith in her.

And - even when at length the powers-that-were granted him a term of furlough so that he might work, travel, and study foreign military methods, and thus prepare himself for his great future - even then the vision of Miss Lawson followed him perpetually.

In a letter written in Paris, he confessed to his mother that he had not yet recovered from the "disorder" into which his love had thrown him. He could not, he said, even hear her name mentioned without "twitching." "But," he added, "my amour has not been without its uses. It has defended me against other women and something softened the disposition to severity and rigour that I had contracted in the camp, trained up as I was, from infancy to the conclusion of the Peace, in war and tumult."

He had resolved, he said, never to marry - now; much though he dreaded the prospect of a life of single blessedness. "It must be a solitary kind of latter life," he wrote, "to leave no relations nor objects to take up our thoughts and affections." But, he reflected, "with us soldiers" marriages must, of necessity, be contracted late. "We are not able," he said, "to feed our wives and children till we begin to decline."

And many disappointed lovers have written in this strain, for the wounds inflicted by Cupid's little arrows are often very painful. But fatal - they prove fatal very, very rarely. The malady usually has but to run its normal course. Though in Wolfe's case, one must confess, progress was slow and tedious.

In the end, however, it was the woman herself who found for him the remedy - that sovereign remedy, disillusionment. In short, the more impassioned his appeals became, the. colder her reception of them. Why, he wondered? Had he been making a fool of himself? Had the girl been merely playing with him? Or, he wailed, "is she the extraordinary woman that has no weakness, or, happily, constructed without passions? Or, lastly, and most likely, does she bid her reason choose?

"She may push that matter too far," he added sagely, "for common-sense demonstrates that one should not remain a maid - of honour - too long." But Miss Lawson did. At any rate, she never married. Perhaps, then, it was no mere idle rumour which declared that some serious impediment prevented her.

Still, Wolfe always cherished her memory tenderly. "My mistress's picture," he wrote in 1754, when staying with her uncle, General Mordaunt, "hangs up in the room where we dine. It took away my stomach for two or three days, and made me grave; but time, the never-failing aid to distressed lovers, has made the semblance of her a pleasing, but not a dangerous object. However, I find it best not to trust myself to the lady's eyes, or put confidence in any resolutions of my own."

But after this one hears very little of her. Another woman usurped the affections of her erstwhile lover, and a more worthy woman. Though exactly when Wolfe first met Miss

Katherine Lowther I know not, nor when he first learned to love her. Still, it would seem, before the close of the year 1756, he had succumbed completely to her charms. But still he dared not tell her of the fact. Love he might - nay, did; but to speak of it - that was a different matter. Mars was his god; Cupid only a secondary deity.

Besides, his finances were in a lamentable muddle. It was more than he could do to pay his own expenses. What right, then, had he, penniless, beset on every side by dangers and by duty, to ask any girl to marry him? None; absolutely none. Nor did he. With the secret of his love known only to himself - to himself and to his mother - he sailed with Amhurst for America.