'This will rouse your spirits,' resumed Freeport.

'Do they want rousing?'

'Well, you looked rather glum last night. Been spoony on some girl in the West, I suppose?'

'Perhaps I was,' replied Cecil, laughing, with a chivalrous idea that to deny his secret love might prove that he was not worthy of it; 'you know that I varied the tedium of country quarters by a visit to the general—old Sir Piers Montgomerie. But I wish you would fall in love, in downright earnest, yourself, Freeport.'

'What harm have I done you that you should wish me this, Falconer?' asked Dick, drily.

'Any fine girls there—at the general's, I mean?' asked a cheeky young sub, of Falconer, who coloured with annoyance, though the boy—a man in his own estimation and that of fast chums, touting tradesmen and money-lenders—was but a boy after all. 'I have heard that his niece, or grand-niece rather, is a stunner. By Jove, he grows absolutely red! Were you writing verses to her eyebrows, and sighing like a furnace, Falconer?'

'You would have sighed like two or three had you tried the process,' said Falconer, turning away.

'I do wish you joy, Falconer,' said his friend Fotheringhame, in a low voice; 'and your promotion puts me one step nearer the rank I held when I first knew Annabelle Erroll, and—and—well, played the fool, or worse!'

Cecil thought, would Mary see the Gazette? The general, he knew, was certain to do so; and Mrs. Garth too, who read it as regularly as an old Chelsea pensioner; but neither might speak of the event, or deem it wise to revive his name at Eaglescraig.

Falconer was somewhat of a pet among the Cameronians. Excellence in all manly sports ever makes a British officer a favourite with his men; thus, as Falconer could keep a wicket well, was also a prime bowler, a good horseman (though he generally owed his mounts to a friend), and could pull a good oar; moreover, as he joined his men in many a match at tennis, football and shinty, he was popular with them, and the eyes of his company seemed to brighten that morning when he came upon parade, and discipline alone repressed the inclination to give him something like a hearty cheer, and for nearly each and all he had some kind word or inquiry—for the officers and men of a regiment should ever feel as one large family. 'Their hopes and fears are similar,' says a writer; 'their turns of exile will come at the same time. Their good and bad quarters will be enjoyed and endured together, and each one shares, in common with the rest, the proud privilege of perchance some day furnishing in his own person that billet to which, the proverb tell us, every bullet is entitled, or of being "wiped out" by sickness in some pestilential clime, or of going down to the bottom of the sea in some rotten old transport. There is something in their order—a distinctiveness, a speciality about it—which makes them cling together, and stand by one another all the faster; for, although mixing freely with the outer world, there is yet an inner one that is entirely their own.'