And all this time Gilian sat silently by, piecing out those scraps of old men’s passion with his child’s fancy. He found this new world into which he had been dragged, noisy, perplexing, interested apparently in the most vague trifles. That they should lay out his future for warfare and for hate, without any regard for his own wishes, was a little alarming. Soldiering--with the man before him in the picture, sitting propped up on his arms, frantic lest the horses should trample on him--seemed the last trade on earth; as for hate, that might be easier and due to his benefactor, but it would depend very much on the Turners. When the brothers released him from their den, and he went to Miss Mary, standing at the kitchen door, eager for his company, with a flush on her cheek and a bright new ribbon at her neck, he laid those points before her. “Tuts!” said she, pressing food on him--her motherhood’s only cure for all a child’s complaints--“they’re only haverils. They cannot make a soger of you against your will. As for the Turners--well, they’re no very likeable race, most of them in my mind. A dour, sour, up-setting clan of no parentage. Perhaps that does not much matter, so long as people are honest and well-doing; we are all equals before God except in head and heart, but there’s something too in our old Hielan’ notion that the closest kith of the King are aye most kindly, because the habit is born in them to be freehanded and unafraid. Am not I the _oinseach_ to be sticking up for pedigrees? Perhaps it is because our own is so good. Kiels was ours three hundred years, and my grandfather was good-brother to an earl--a not very good nor honest lord they say--and the Turners were only portioners and tenants as far back as we ken.” “I liked the look of the one with his hair in a tail,” said Gilian, and he wondered if she was angry at his admiration of the enemy, when he saw her face grow red. --“Oh! the General!” she exclaimed, but never a word more, good or ill. CHAPTER VII--THE MAN ON THE QUAY