“It was the odd thing about you that you often did,” she replied. “It’s a mercy you do not know it always, John Hielan’man,” she thought.
“You are remembering the evening we walked in the Duke’s garden,” he said. “It looks but yesterday, and I was a child, and now I’m as old—as old as the hills.” He looked vaguely with half-shut eyes upon the looming round of Cowal, where Sitbean Sluaidhe was tipped with brass. “As old as the hills,” he went on, eager to display himself, and also to show he appreciated her advantages. “Do you know I begin to find them irksome? They close in and make a world so narrow here! I envy you the years you have been away. In that time you have grown, mind and body, like a tree. I stunt, if not in body, at least in mind, here in the glens.”
She looked at him covertly with her face still half averted, and found him now more interesting than she had expected, touched with something of romance and mystery, his eyes with that unfathomed quality that to some women makes a strange appeal.
“One sees much among strangers,” she confessed. “I thought you had been out of here long ago. You remember when I left for Edinburgh they talked of the army for you?”
“The army,” he said, wincing imperceptibly. “Oh! that was the Paymaster’s old notion. Once I almost fell in with it, and as odd a thing as you could imagine put an end to the scheme. Do you know what it was?” He glanced at her with a keen scrutiny.
“No, tell me,” she said.
“It was the very day we were here last, when the county corps moved off to Stirling. I was in the rear of them very much a soldier indeed, shouldering a switch, feeling myself a Major-General at the very least, when a girl sitting on the gate there, waving a tiny shoe, caught my eye, drew me back from the troops I was following, and extinguished my martial glory as if it were a flambeau thrown in the sea. I think that was the very last of the army for me.”
“I don’t understand it,” she said.
“Nor I,” he confessed frankly; “only there’s the fact! All I know is that you cut me off from every idea of the army then and there. I forgot all about it, and it had been possessing my mind for a week before, night and day.”
“I think I remember now that I told you, did I not, that you were not likely to be a soldier because you could pretend it too well ever to be the thing in actuality.”