"What you tell me about your young friend, Master de Lochiel, interests me very much. I grant your request with the greatest pleasure. Give him my compliments, and beg him to come and spend his next vacation with us, and all his vacations so long as he is attending college. If he does not consider this invitation sufficiently formal, I will write to him myself. His father sleeps upon a glorious field. Soldiers are brothers everywhere; so should their sons be likewise. Let him come to our own hearth-stone, and our hearts shall open to him as to one of our own blood." Archie was so affected by the warmth of this invitation that for some moments he could not answer. "Come, my haughty Scotlander, will you do us the honor?" said his friend. "Or must my father send, on a special embassy, his chief butler, José Dubé, with the bagpipes slung on his back in the form of a St. Andrew's cross--as is the custom, I believe, among your Highland chiefs--to present you his invitation with all due formality?" "As, fortunately, I am no longer in my Highlands," said Archie, laughing, "we can dispense with these formalities. I shall write at once to Captain D'Haberville, and thank him with my whole heart for his noble generosity to the exiled orphan." "Then, let us speak reasonably for once," said Jules, "if only for the novelty of the thing. You think me very light, silly, and scatter-brained. I acknowledge that there is a little of all that in me, which does not prevent me from being in earnest more often than you think. I have long been seeking a friend, a true and high-hearted friend. I have watched you very closely, and I find you all I could wish. Lochiel, will you be my friend?" "Without a moment's question, my dear boy," answered Archie, "for I have always felt strongly attracted toward you." "Well, then," cried Jules, grasping his hand warmly, "it is for life and death with us Lochiel!" Thus, between a boy of twelve and a boy of fourteen, was ratified a friendship which in the sequel will be exposed to the crudest tests. "Here's a letter from mother," said Jules, "in which there is a word for you": "I hope your friend, Master de Lochiel, will do us the pleasure of accepting your father's invitation. We are all eager to meet him. His room is ready, alongside of your own. In the box which José will hand you there is a parcel for him which he would grieve me greatly by refusing. In sending it I am thinking of the mother he has lost." The box contained equal shares for the two boys of cakes, sweetmeats, jams, and other dainties. The friendship between the two boys grew stronger day by day. They became inseparable. Their college-mates dubbed them variously Damon and Pythias, Orestes and Pylades, Nisus and Euryalus. At last they called them the brothers.