“I met him accidentally in the street,” Philip answered, with an apologetic shrug, by no means well pleased at being thus held responsible for all the stranger’s moral and social vagaries.  “It’s the merest chance acquaintance.  I know nothing of his antecedents.  I—­er—­I lent him a bag, and he’s fastened himself upon me ever since like a leech, and come constantly to my sister’s.  But I haven’t the remotest idea who he is or where he hails from.  He keeps his business wrapped up from all of us in the profoundest mystery.”

“He’s a gentleman, anyhow,” the General put in with military decisiveness.  “How manly of him to acknowledge at once about the cobbler being probably a near relation!  Most men, you know, Christy, would have tried to hide it; he didn’t for a second.  He admitted his ancestors had all been cobblers till quite a recent period.”

Philip was astonished at this verdict of the General’s, for he himself, on the contrary, had noted with silent scorn that very remark as a piece of supreme and hopeless stupidity on Bertram’s part.  No fellow can help having a cobbler for a grandfather, of course:  but he need not be such a fool as to volunteer any mention of the fact spontaneously.

“Yes, I thought it bold of him,” Monteith answered, “almost bolder than was necessary; for he didn’t seem to think we should be at all surprised at it.”

The General mused to himself.  “He’s a fine soldierly fellow,” he said, gazing after the tall retreating figure.  “I should like to make a dragoon of him.  He’s the very man for a saddle.  He’d dash across country in the face of heavy guns any day with the best of them.”

“He rides well,” Philip answered, “and has a wonderful seat.  I saw him on that bay mare of Wilder’s in town the other afternoon, and I must say he rode much more like a gentleman than a cobbler.”

“Oh, he’s a gentleman,” the General repeated, with unshaken conviction:  “a thoroughbred gentleman.”  And he scanned Philip up and down with his keen grey eye as if internally reflecting that Philip’s own right to criticise and classify that particular species of humanity was a trifle doubtful.  “I should much like to make a captain of hussars of him.  He’d be splendid as a leader of irregular horse; the very man for a scrimmage!” For the General’s one idea when he saw a fine specimen of our common race was the Zulu’s or the Red Indian’s—­what an admirable person he would be to employ in killing and maiming his fellow-creatures!

“He’d be better engaged so,” the Dean murmured reflectively, “than in diffusing these horrid revolutionary and atheistical doctrines.”  For the Church was as usual in accord with the sword; theoretically all peace, practically all bloodshed and rapine and aggression:  and anything that was not his own opinion envisaged itself always to the Dean’s crystallised mind as revolutionary and atheistic.