And yet even on the first happy evening, when we walked up through the dusk together to the old earthwork, and he told us the first chapter of his adventures, I seemed to see, or rather to feel, that our brother was not wholly a better man for his campaigning.  To be sure, a soldier must be allowed an oath or two; but Mark slipped out one before his sister which took me like a slap across the cheek.  He bit his lip the moment it was out, and talked rapidly and at random for a while, with a dark flush on his face.  Margery pretended that she had not heard, and for the rest he told his story with a manly carelessness which became him.  Once only, when he described the entry of the troops into Bristol and their behaviour there—­while Margery turned her eyes aside for a moment, that were dim for the death of Slanning and Trevanion—­he came to a pause with a grin that invited me to be knowing beyond my years.  The old Mark would never have looked at me with that meaning.

On the whole he behaved well, and took Margery’s adoration with great patience.  He had the wit to wish to fall nothing in her eyes.  His new and earthlier view of war, as a game with coarse rewards, he confided to me; and this not in words but in a smile now and then and a general air when safe from his sister’s eyes, of being passably amused by her high-fangled nonsense.  His business of beating up recruits took him away from us for days together; and we missed him on Christmas Eve when we christened the apple-trees as usual.  It was I who discovered and kept it from Margery—­who supposed him as far away as St. Austell, and tried to find that distance a sufficient excuse—­that he had spent the night a bare mile away, hobnobbing with the owner of Lantine, a rich man who had used to look down on our family but thought it worth while to make friends with this promising young soldier.

“And I mean to be equal with him and his likes,” said Mark to me afterwards by way of excuse.  “A man may rise by soldiering as by any other calling—­and quicker too, perhaps, in these days.”

The same thought clearly was running in his head a week later, when he took leave of us once more by the ford.

“Come back to us, Mark!” Margery wept this time, with her arms about his neck.

“Ay, sweetheart, and with an estate in my pocket.”

“Ah, forget that old folly!  Come back with body safe and honour bright, and God may take the rest.”

He slapped his pocket with a laugh as he shook up the reins.

Then followed five quiet anxious months.  ’Twas not until early in June that, by an express from Ashburton in Devon, we heard that our brother’s fortune was still rising, he having succeeded to the command of his company made vacant by the wounding of Captain Sir Harry Welcome.  “And this is no mean achievement for a poor yeoman’s son,” he wrote, “in an army where promotion goes as a rule to them that have estates to pawn.  But I hope in these days some few may serve his Majesty and yet prosper, and that my dear Margery may yet have her wish and be mistress in Lantine.”  Margery read this letter and knit her brow thoughtfully.  “It was like Mark to think of writing so,” said she; “but I have not thought of Lantine for this many a day.”