against her cheek and coyly kissed it.

The General turned his look upon her wet face with a moment's
comprehension. "Tuts! never mind, Mary, my dear," said he, "it might
have been with Jamie yonder on the field, and there--there you have a
son--in a manner--left to comfort you." Then he began to wander anew. "A
son," said he, "a son. Whose son? Turner threw our sonlessness in our
Jock's face, but it was in my mind there was a boy somewhere we expected
something of."

Miss Mary beckoned on Gilian to come forward to the bedside. He rose
from the chair he sat on in the farthest corner with his dreads and
faltered over.

"What boy's this?" said the General, looking at him with surmising eyes.
"He puts me in mind of--of--of--of an old tale somewhere with a sunny
day in it. Nan! Nan! Nan!--that's the name. I knew I would come on
it, for the sound of it was always like a sunny day in Portugal or
Spain--_He estado en Espana_."

"This is the boy, Dugald," said Miss Mary; "this is just our Gilian."

"I see that. I know him finely," said the General, turning upon him a
roving melancholy eye: "Jock's recruit.... Did you get back from your
walk, my young lad? I never could fathom you, but perhaps you have your
parts.... Well, well... what are ye dreaming on the day?... Eh? Ha! ha!
ha! Aye dreaming, that was you; you'll be dreaming next that the lassie
likes you. Mind, she jilted Jock, she jilted Colin, she jilted me; were
we not the born idiots? yet still-and-on.... Sixty miles in twenty-four
hours; good marching, lads, good marching, for half-starved men, and not
the true heather-bred at that."

The voice was becoming weaker in every sentence, the flush was paling
on the countenance. Standing by the bedside, the Cornal looked upon his
brother with a most rueful visage, his face hoved up with tears.

"This beats all!" said he, and he turned and went beside the men at the
window, leaving Miss Mary caressing still at the hand upon the coverlet,
and with an arm about the boy.

"He was a strong, fine, wiry man in his time," said MacGibbon, looking
over his shoulder at this end of a stormy life. "I mind him at Talavera;
I think he was at his very best there."

The Paymaster looked, too, at the figure upon the bed, looked with a
bent head, under lowered eyebrows, his lip and chin brown with snuffy
tears.

"At sixteen he threw the cabar against the champion of the three shires,
and though he was a sober man a bottle was neith