He turned hastily from the window and nervously paced the room.
“No matter about me,” he answered in a little. “Ah! you’re your mother’s child. I wish—I wish I could leave you content here.” He felt at his chin with a nervous hand, muttered, looked on her askance, pitied himself that when he went wandering he must not have the consoling thought that she was safe and happy in her childhood’s home.
“I wish I had never sent you away,” he said. “You would have been more content to-day. But that’s the manner of the world, we must pay our way as we go, in inns and in knowledge.”
She ran up with tripping feet and kissed him rapturously.
“No lowland tricks!” he cried, pleased and yet ashamed at a display unusual in these parts. “Fancy if some one saw you!”
“Then let them look well again,” she said, laughingly defiant, and he had to stoop to avoid the assault of her ripe and laughing lips. The little struggle had brought a flame to her eye that grew large and lambent; where her lower neck showed in a chink of her kerchief-souffle it throbbed and glowed. The General found himself wondering if this was, indeed, his: child, the child he had but the other day held in the crook of his arm and dandled on his knee.
“I wish,” said he again, while she neatly tied the knot upon his queue, “I wish we had a husband for you, good or—indifferent, before I go.”
“Not indifferent, father,” she laughed. “Surely the best would not be too good for your daughter! As if I wanted a husband of any kind!”
“True, true,” he answered thoughtfully. “You are young yet. The best would not be too good for you; but I know men, my dear, and the woman’s well off who gets merely the middling in her pick of them. And that minds me, I had one asking for you at the kirk on Sunday. A soldier, no less. Can you guess him?”
“The Paymaster’s Boy,” said she promptly, curiosity in her countenance.