mpromising the old man
was, that it would be a word and a blow. For aught he knew to the
contrary letters might have been written by then, making arrangements
for him to go to some institution where he would be trained to enter
into some pursuit that he might detest. Time back there had been talk
about his future, the old man having pleasantly asked him what he would
like to be. He had replied. "An officer in the Army," and then stood
startled by the change which came over the old man's face.

"No," he had said, scowling, "I could never consent to that, Aleck. I
might agree to your going into the Navy, but as a soldier, emphatically
no."

"Why doesn't he want me to be a soldier?" mused the boy. "He was a
soldier himself. I should like to know the whole truth. It can't be
what he said."

Aleck sat wrinkling up his brow and thinking for some little time. Not
for long; it made his head ache too much, and he changed from soldiering
to sailoring.

"I don't see why I shouldn't," he said, half drowsily, for a strange
sensation of weariness came over him. "I should like to be a sailor.
Why not go? Tom Bodger would help me to get a ship; and as uncle is
going to send me away, talking as if he had quite done with me, I don't
see why I shouldn't go."

The drowsy feeling increased, so that the boy to keep it off began to
look over his clothes, thinking deeply the while, but in a way that was
rather unnatural, for his hurts had not been without the effect of
making him a little feverish. And as he thought he began to mutter
about what had taken place that afternoon.

"Uncle can't like me," he said. "He has been kind, but he never talked
to me like this before. He wants to get rid of me, to send me away
somewhere to some place where I shouldn't like to go. I've no father,
no mother, to mind my going, so why shouldn't I? He'll be glad I'm
gone, or he wouldn't have talked to me like that."

Aleck rested his throbbing head upon his crossed arms and sank into a
feverish kind of sleep, during which, in a short half-hour, he went
through what seemed like an age of trouble, before he started up, and in
an excited, spasmodic way, hardly realising what he was doing in his
half-waking, half-sleeping state, but under the influence of his
troubled thoughts, he roughly selected a few of his under-things for a
change and made them up into a bundle, after which he counted over the
money he had left after the morning's disbu