The absent also exerted a far greater power upon the home than any one believed. Ian's letters came with persistent regularity, and the influence of one was hardly spent, when another arrived of quite a different character. Ian was rapidly realizing his hopes. He had been gladly taken into a surgical corps, under the charge of a Doctor Frazer, and his life was a continual drama of stirring events. Generally he wrote between actions, and then he described the gallant young men resting on the slopes of the beleaguered hill, with their weapons at their finger tips, but always cheerful. Sometimes he spoke of them under terrible fire in their life-or-death push forward, followed by the surgeons and stretcher-bearers. Sometimes, he had been to the trenches to dress a wound that would not stop bleeding, but always he wondered at seeing the resolute grit and calmness of these young men, who had been the dandies in London drawing-rooms a year ago and who were now smoking placidly in the trenches at Redan. "What is it?" he asked an old surgeon, on whom he was waiting. "Is it recklessness?" "No, sir!" was the answer. "It is straight courage. Courage in the blood. Courage nourished on their mother's milk. Courage educated into them at Eton or Rugby, in many a fight and scuffle. Courage that lived with them night and day at Oxford or Cambridge, and that made them choose danger and death rather than be known for one moment as a cad or a coward. It was dancing last year. It is fighting in a proper quarrel this year. Different duties, that is all." Every now and then Sunna dropped them letters about which there was much pleasant speculating, for as the summer came forward, she began to accept the disappointments made by the death of Boris, and to consider what possibilities of life were still within her power. She said in May that "she was sick and weary of everything about Sebastopol, and that she wanted to go back to Scotland, far more frantically than she ever wanted to leave it." In June, she said, she had got her grandfather to listen to reason, but had been forced to cry for what she wanted, a humiliation beyond all apologies. Her next letter was written in Edinburgh, where she declared she intended to stay for some time. Maximus Grant was in Edinburgh with his little brother, who was under the care and treatment of an eminent surgeon living there. "The poor little laddie is dying," she said, "but I am able to help him over many bad hours, and Max is not half-bad, that is, he might be worse if left to himself. Heigh-ho! What varieties of men, and varieties of their trials, poor women have to put up with!"