smile upon her lips, and he was master of her
thought before she had expressed it.

"I know exactly what you are thinking of," he said.

"It was the odd thing about you that you often did," she replied. "It's
a mercy you do not know it always, John Hielan'man," she thought.

"You are remembering the evening we walked in the Duke's garden," he
said. "It looks but yesterday, and I was a child, and now I'm as old--as
old as the hills." He looked vaguely with half-shut eyes upon the
looming round of Cowal, where Sitbean Sluaidhe was tipped with brass.
"As old as the hills," he went on, eager to display himself, and also
to show he appreciated her advantages. "Do you know I begin to find them
irksome? They close in and make a world so narrow here! I envy you the
years you have been away. In that time you have grown, mind and body,
like a tree. I stunt, if not in body, at least in mind, here in the
glens."

She looked at him covertly with her face still half averted, and found
him now more interesting than she had expected, touched with something
of romance and mystery, his eyes with that unfathomed quality that to
some women makes a strange appeal.

"One sees much among strangers," she confessed. "I thought you had been
out of here long ago. You remember when I left for Edinburgh they talked
of the army for you?"

"The army," he said, wincing imperceptibly. "Oh! that was the
Paymaster's old notion. Once I almost fell in with it, and as odd a
thing as you could imagine put an end to the scheme. Do you know what it
was?" He glanced at her with a keen scrutiny.

"No, tell me," she said.

"It was the very day we were here last, when the county corps moved
off to Stirling. I was in the rear of them very much a soldier indeed,
shouldering a switch, feeling myself a Major-General at the very least,
when a girl sitting on the gate there, waving a tiny shoe, caught my
eye, drew me back from the troops I was following, and extinguished my
martial glory as if it were a flambeau thrown in the sea. I think that
was the very last of the army for me."

"I don't understand it," she said.

"Nor I," he confessed frankly; "only there's the fact! All I know is
that you cut me off from every idea of the army then and there. I forgot
all about it, and it had been possessing my mind for a week before,
night and day."

"I think I remember now that I told you, did I not, that you were not
likely to be a soldier because you could preten