It is useless to dwell on this lamentable part of the story.
He was just twenty-one: he was blindly devoted to a worthless woman; and she led him on, with merciless cunning, till it was too late to draw back.

In one word, he committed the fatal error of his life: he married her.
"She had been wise enough in her own interests to dread the influence of his brother-officers, and to persuade him, up to the period of the marriage ceremony, to keep the proposed union between them a secret.
She could do this; but she could not provide against the results of accident.

Hardly three months had passed, when a chance disclosure exposed the life she had led before her marriage.

But one alternative was left to her husband--the alternative of instantly separating from her.
"The effect of the discovery on the unhappy boy--for a boy in disposition he still was--may be judged by the event which followed the exposure.

One of Andrew's superior officers--a certain Major Kirke, if I remember right--found him in his quarters, writing to his father a confession of the disgraceful truth, with a loaded pistol by his side.
That officer saved the lad's life from his own hand, and hushed up the scandalous affair by a compromise.