On a week-end, perhaps, the veterans would come up to cheer him if they could; tobacco that he nor any of his had cared for in that form would send its cloud among Miss Mary’s dear naperies, but she never complained: they might have fumed her out of press and pantry if they brought her brother cheer. They talked loudly; they laughed boisterously; they acted a certain zest in life: for a little he would rouse to their entertainment, fiddling heedlessly with an empty glass, but anon he would see the portrait of Dugald looking on them wondering at their folly, and that must daunten him. It would not take long till some extravagance of these elders made him wince, and there was Cornal Colin again in the dolours, poor company for them that would harbour any delusion of youth. It was pitiful then to see them take their departures, almost slinking, ashamed to have sounded the wrong note in that chamber of sober recollections. Miss Mary, lighting them to the door with one of her mother’s candlesticks, felt as she had the light above her head and showed them down the stair as if she had been the last left at a funeral feast. Her shadow on the wall, dancing before her as she returned, seemed some mockery of the night. Only Old Brooks could rouse the Cornal to some spirit of liveliness. In a neighbourly compassion the dominie would come in of a Sunday or a Friday evening, leaving for an hour or two the books he was so fond of that he must have a little one in his pocket to feel the touch of when he could not be studying the pages. Seated in the Cornal’s chair, he had a welcome almost blithe. For he was a man of great urbanity, sobered by thought upon the complexities of life, but yet with sparkling courage. He found the brothers now contemptuous of the boy who showed no sign of adaptability or desire for that gallant career that had been theirs. These, indeed, were the cold days for Gilian in a household indifferent to him save Miss Mary, who grew fonder every day, doting upon him like a lover for a score of reasons, but most of all because he was that rarity the perpetual child, and she must be loving somewhere. “I have not seen the lad at school for a week now,” Brooks said, compelled at last by long truancies. “So?” said the Cornal, showing no interest “It is not my affair. John must look after his own recruit, who seems an uncommon tardy one, Mr. Brooks--an uncommon tardy.” “But I get small satisfaction from the Captain.” “I daresay, I daresay; would you wonder at that in our Jock? He’s my brother, but some way there is wanting in him the stuff of Jamie and of Dugald. Even in his throes upon his latter bed Dugald could see what Jock could never see--the doom in this lad’s countenance. As for me, I was done with the fellow after the trick he played us in his story of the wreck on Ealan Dubh. I blame him, in a way, for my brother Dugald’s stroke.”