and
Thunder." He did not at all object to the name, which had filtered from
regimental into common use. The crowd was always "Boys!" to him. He had
a most amiable feeling towards it, were it ever so frowsy and undersized
and sallow. But he loved a soldier-man, and could hardly bear to pass
one in the street without stopping to speak to him.

One delightful thing about Sir Denis was the esteem in which he held his
own calling of arms. It might be questioned whether he held the Church
even in higher honour. He was no subscriber to the belief that the army
must necessarily be a refuge of rapscallions. "Straighten your
shoulders, sir; hold your head high; for, remember that you are now a
soldier!" he would say to the newest recruit who had just scraped
through with a margin of chest. His thunderous wrath and sorrow when one
of his "boys" was guilty of conduct unbecoming a soldier were something
which, in time, impressed even the least impressionable. His old
regiment, which he delighted to talk about, he had left a model
regiment.

"There's a deal of good in the soldier-man," he would say to his
daughter Nelly. "The poor fellows, they're good boys, they're very good
boys."

Sir Denis had married, as he was approaching middle age, a very
beautiful young girl, who had fallen in love at first with the soldier,
and afterwards with the man.

His Nell had left him in his daughter Nelly a replica of herself. During
the years of service that remained to him the child was always as near
to him as might be. Fortunately, by this time the period of his foreign
service was all but at an end. Wherever he had his command the child and
her nurse were always within riding distance. He did not believe in
barracks and towns for the rearing of anything so fresh and tender. His
Nelly must have the fields and the woods and the waters. In later years
her milkmaid freshness owed, perhaps, something to this upbringing.

Later, she went to school. Sir Gerald's widow, to whom Sir Denis always
referred as the Dowager, who had taken an unasked-for interest in the
motherless child from her birth, had found the ideal school for Nelly--a
school where the daughters of the aristocracy were kept in a conventual
seclusion while they learnt as little as might be of the simpler
virtues, but a deal of the way to step in and out of a carriage, to
comport themselves with dignity, to bear themselves in the presence of
their sovereign, and so on.

Sir Denis