"You'll come down and have a chat with us when you've finished your smoke, Malcolm?" she said cheerfully. So it came about that Mr. Wycherly actually entertained a man of about his own age and social standing in his room at Remote.
They seemed to have plenty to say, and the Colonel's big, jolly laugh rang out from time to time.
When he came down he took a small boy on each knee and poked fun at them: till, finally, out of a perfect farrago of nonsense, they elucidated the fact that they were to go over to Pier's Hill twice a week to be drilled and instructed in the noble art of self-defence: and that the Colonel would himself write to London that very night for the two smallest pairs of boxing-gloves made.
"Did Guardie ask you about it?" Montagu inquired anxiously.
"Will my soldier teach us?" Edmund demanded at the same instant.
"Who will take us?" both asked at once, and before the Colonel could disentangle the questions his horse was brought round by a lad engaged for the purpose that very afternoon. And the weather was discovered to be perfectly fine.
The whole family turned out to see him mount and ride off, for Montagu had rushed upstairs to fetch Mr. Wycherly, that he might not miss this entrancing spectacle.
The Colonel, as he reached the corner, looked back at the little group standing by the green gate and waved his hat to them: and for just a minute after the landscape seemed a little blurred.
"There are more ways than one of making men," he said to a brother officer at mess that night. "It's the quaintest household, but upon my soul, I'm not at all sure that those two capital little chaps are not rather to be envied."
The Colonel was not familiar with the writings of a certain monk of Flanders, or he might have remembered that it is love alone that "maketh light all that is burthensome and equally bears all that is unequal."