Gilian was in a great dread, but revealed none of it in the half dusk of the room where he faced the two brothers as they sat at either side of the table. The General took out a bottle of spirits and placed it with scrupulous care in the very centre of the table; his brother lifted two tumblers from the corner cupboard and put them on each side of the bottle, fastidious to a hair’s breadth as if he had been laying out columns of troops. It was the formula of the afternoon; sometimes they never put a lip to the glass, but it was always necessary that the bottle should be in the party. For a space that seemed terribly long to the boy they said no word but looked at him. The eyes of the Cornal seemed to pierce him through; the General in a while seemed to forget his presence, turning upon him a flat, vacant eye. Gilian leaned upon his other foot and was on the verge of crying at his situation. The day had been far too crowded with strangers and new experience for his comfort; he felt himself cruelly plucked out of his own sufficient company and jarred by contact with a very complex world. With a rude loud sound that shook the toddy ladles in the cupboard the Cornal cleared his throat. “How old are you?” he asked, and this roused the General, who came back from his musings with a convulsive start, and repeated his brother’s question. “Twelve,” said Gilian, first in Gaelic out of instinct, and hurriedly repeating it in English lest he should offend the gentlemen. “Twelve,” said the Cornal, thinking hard. “You are not very bulky for your age. Is he now, Dugald?” “He is not very bulky for his age,” said the General, after a moment’s pause as if he were recalling all the boys he knew of that age, or remitting himself to the days before his teens. “And now, between ourselves,” said the Cornal, leaning over with a show of intimacy and even friendliness, “have you any notion yourself of being a soger?” “I never thought anything about it,” Gilian confessed in a low tone. “I can be anything the Captain would like me to be.” “Did you ever hear the like?” cried the Cornal, looking in amazement at his brother. “He never thought anything about it, but he can be anything he likes. Is not that a good one? Anything he likes!” And he laughed with a choked and heavy effort till the scar upon his face fired like blood, and Gilian seemed to see it gape and flow as it did when the sword-slash struck it open in Corunna. “Anything he likes!” echoed the General, laughing huskily till he coughed and choked. They both sat smiling grimly with no more sound till it seemed to the boy he must be in a dream, looking at the creations of his brain. The step of a fly could have been heard in the room almost, so sunk was it in silence, but outside, as in another world, a band of children filled the street with the chant of “Pity be”--chant of the trumpeters of the Lords.