“No,” she said, “men only pretend to like it when there’s a party: they never like it when they mean serious work.”
“Do you ever desire work, Archie?” said his father, “Come in with a good bag, there’s a good fellow.”
“If I might speak a word, sir,” said Roderick, “the finest fallow in the world will no bring up a cheeper if there’s nane to come.”
“Well, well, start early, and good luck to you,” said Rowland.
And they all came out to meet the pair returning in the afternoon, Archie more dead than alive, with his hands blistered and his shins scratched, and the look of absolute exhaustion on his face, but somehow with a bird or two in his bag which he was not conscious of, still less of how they got there.
“Ou ay, there’s aye a hare or twa,” said the gamekeeper; “but it was very warm on the hill, and Mr. Archibald is not used to the work, as few gentlemen are the first day. I’ll take your gun, sir, and I’ll take your bag, and the ladies will give ye a lift hame.”
Archie obeyed, and clambered into the carriage, the most dilapidated sportsman, perhaps, that the evening of the twelfth ever saw.
“Well, sir, had ye good sport?” said his father, feeling a glow of pride in the performances of the boy.
“Oh, I don’t know if you call that good sport,” the lad said with a gasp.
But this was set down to modesty, or fatigue, or crossness, which unfortunately had grown of late to be a recognised quality of Archie. And Mr. Rowland himself took down a brace of grouse to the Manse next morning, a proud father handing out “my son’s birds,” as if Archie had been the finest shot in the world. But this was not Archie’s fault, who knew nothing of the transaction. He managed to be able to carry his gun like other feeble sportsmen after that terrible initiation. Thus both Mr. Rowland’s children learned to adapt themselves to the duties of their new sphere.