could
be done."

"I believe you would sooner do it that way than the other," she said,
standing back from him, and looking with shrewd scrutiny. "Oh, I don't
like the kind of boy you are."

"Except when you are singing, and then you like to have me listening
because I understand," said Gilian, smiling with pleasure at his own
astuteness.

She reddened at his discovery and then laughed in some confusion. "You
are thinking of the time I sang in the cabin to Black Duncan. You looked
so white and curious sitting yonder in the dark, I could have stopped my
song and laughed."

"You could not," he answered quite boldly, "because your eyes were----"

"Never mind that," said she abruptly. "I was not speaking of singing or
of eyes, but I'm telling you I like men, men, men, the kind of men who
do things, brave things, hard things, like soldiers. Oh, I wish I was
the soldier who kissed his hand to me! What is pretending and thinking?
I can do that in a way at home over my sampler or my white seam. But to
be commanding, and fighting the enemies of the country, to be good with
the sword and the gun and strong with a horse, like my father!"

"I have seen your father," said Gilian. "That is the kind of soldier
I would like to be." He said so, generously, with some of the Highland
flauery; he said so meaning it, for Turner the bold, the handsome, the
adventurer, the man with years of foreign life in mystery, was always
the ideal soldier of Brooks' school.

"You are a far nicer boy than I thought you were," said she enjoying
the compliment. "Only--only--I think when you can pretend so much
to yourself you cannot so well do the things you pretend. You can be
soldiering in your mind so like the real thing that you may never go
soldiering at all. And of course that would not be the sort of soldier
my father is."

A mellowed wail of the bagpipe came from Strone, the last farewell of
the departing soldiers; it was but a moment, then was gone. The wind
changed from the land, suddenly the odours of the traffics of peace blew
familiarly, the scents of gathered hay and the more elusive perfume of
yellowing corn. A myriad birds, among them the noisy rooks the blackest
and most numerous, sped home. In the bay the skiffs spread out their
pinions, the halyards singing in the blocks, the men ye-hoing. For a
space the bows rose and fell, lazy, reluctant to be moving in their
weary wrestle with the sea, then tore into the blue and made a feath