“I’ve been up to see you, laddie,” said he, “but I must home again now.  My visit has not been wasted, however, as I had an opportunity of seeing la belle cousine.  A most charming and engaging young lady, laddie.”

He had a formal stiff way of talking, and was fond of jerking in a bit of the French, for he had picked some up in the Peninsula.  He would have gone on talking of Cousin Edie, but I saw the corner of a newspaper thrusting out of his pocket, and I knew that he had come over, as was his way, to give me some news, for we heard little enough at West Inch.

“What is fresh, Major?” I asked.  He pulled the paper out with a flourish.

“The allies have won a great battle, my lad,” says he.  “I don’t think Nap can stand up long against this.  The Saxons have thrown him over, and he’s been badly beat at Leipzig.  Wellington is past the Pyrenees, and Graham’s folk will be at Bayonne before long.”

I chucked up my hat.

“Then the war will come to an end at last,” I cried.

“Aye, and time too,” said he, shaking his head gravely.  “It’s been a bloody business.  But it is hardly worth while for me to say now what was in my mind about you.”

“What was that?”

“Well, laddie, you are doing no good here, and now that my knee is getting more limber I was hoping that I might get on active service again.  I wondered whether maybe you might like to do a little soldiering under me.”

My heart jumped at the thought.

“Aye, would I!” I cried.

“But it’ll be clear six months before I’ll be fit to pass a board, and it’s long odds that Boney will be under lock and key before that.”

“And there’s my mother,” said I, “I doubt she’d never let me go.”

“Ah! well, she’ll never be asked to now,” he answered, and hobbled on upon his way.

I sat down among the heather with my chin on my hand, turning the thing over in my mind, and watching him in his old brown clothes, with the end of a grey plaid flapping over his shoulder, as he picked his way up the swell of the hill.  It was a poor life this, at West Inch, waiting to fill my father’s shoes, with the same heath, and the same burn, and the same sheep, and the same grey house for ever before me.  But over there, over the blue sea, ah! there was a life fit for a man.  There was the Major, a man past his prime, wounded and spent, and yet planning to get to work again, whilst I, with all the strength of my youth, was wasting it upon these hillsides.  A hot wave of shame flushed over me, and I sprang up all in a tingle to be off and playing a man’s part in the world.

For two days I turned it over in my mind, and on the third there came something which first brought all my resolutions to a head, and then blew them all to nothing like a puff of smoke in the wind.