"We took our scuds gamely, and there was no more to
do. God knows we have had plenty since--made wanderers for the King, ill
fed for the King, wounded and blooded for the King. What does it matter
for one that was a girl and is now no more but a clod in Kilmalieu? I'm
forgetting it all fast I would never be minding it at all but for you
and Miss Mary there, and that picture of the man I was once, on the
wall. I mind more of Badajos and San Sebastian--that was the roaring,
the bloody, the splendid time!--than of the girl that played us on
her string--three brothers at a single cast--a witch's fishing. What
nonsense is this to be bringing up at our time of life? In the hearing
of a wean too."

A cough choked him and he stopped. At Gilian, sitting still and
seemingly uncomprehending, the Cornal looked as at a stranger. "So
it is," said he; "just a wean! I forgot, some way. How old are
you--sixteen? Nonsense! By the look of you I would say a hundred. Oh,
you're an old-farrent one, sitting there with your lugs cocked. And what
do you think is the moral of my story? Eh?--the moral of it? The lesson
of it? What? What? What?"

Gilian had the answer in a flash. "It is to be younger than the other
man; it is----"

"What?" cried the Cornal. "That's the moral? To be younger than the
other man. No more than that? To be young? Old Brooks never put you to
your AEsops when that's all you can make of it."

The General sat back and folded his soft thick hands upon his lap. He
drew in his breath and blew it out again with the gasp of the wearied
emerging from water. "Do you know, Dugald," said he, "there's something
in that view of it? We were not young enough. We had too sober an eye
on life. Youth is not in the straight back or the clear eye; there is
something more, and--the person you mentioned had it, and has it yet."

"That's all havers," said the Cornal; "all havers. I was as jocular at
the time as Jiggy Crawford himself. It did not come natural, but I could
force myself to it. The blame was not with us. She was a wanton hussy
first and last, and God be with her!"

He gripped the boy by the jacket collar. "Up and away," said he. "If my
tale's in vain, there's no help for it. I cannot make it plainer. Do
not be a fool, wasting the hours that are due to your tasks in loitering
with the daughter of a woman who has her mother's eye and her mother's
songs, and maybe her mother's heart."

He pushed the boy almost rudely out at th