Up stood the Cornal with a face transfigured. He stretched across the table and almost rudely clutched the paper from his brother’s hand, cast a fast glance at the contents and superscription, then sat again and gave a little choked cheer, the hurrah of spent youth and joyfulness. “Curse me! but it’s true,” he cried to the General. “The old 91st under Crawford--Jiggy Crawford we called him for his dance in the ken at Madrid before he exchanged--Friday, Friday; where’s my uniform, Mary? They’ll be raw recruits, I’ll warrant, not the old stuff, but--are you hearing, Dugald? Oh! the Army, the Army! Let me see--yes, it says six pipers and thirty band. My medals, Mary, are they in the shuttle of my kist yet? The 91st--God! I wish it was our own; would I not show them! You are not hearing a word I am saying, Dugald.” He paused in a feverish movement in his chair, thrust off from him with a clatter of dishes and a spilling of milk the breakfast still unfinished, and stared with annoyance at the General. Dugald picked at his fish with no appetite, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, a silent old man palsied on one side, with a high bald head full of visions. “What’s that about the Argyls?” he said at last, with a start, brought to by the tone and accent of his brother. Cornal Colin cleared his throat, and read the notification of the billet “Friday, did you say Friday?” asked Dugald, all abstraction gone. “This very Friday.” The old man rose and threw back his shoulders with some of the gallantry of his prime. He walked without a word to the window and looked at the deserted street. Ten--fifteen--twenty years fell from his back as thus he stood in the mingled light of the wan reluctant morning and the guttering candles on the table. To Miss Mary, looking at him there against the morning light, his figure--black and indefinite--was the figure that went to Spain, the strong figure, the straight figure, the figure that filled its clothes with manliness. There was but the oval of the bald high head to spoil the illusion. He turned again and looked into the candle-lit room, but seeing nothing there, for all his mind was elsewhere. “I thought,” he muttered, brokenly, “I thought I would never see red-coat again.” Then he straightened his shoulders anew, and flexed the sinews of his knees, and pressed the palsied hand against the breeches’ seam. The exertion brought a cough to his throat, a choking resistless cough of age and clogging humours. It was Time’s mocking reminder that the morning parade was over for ever, and now the soldier must be at ease. He gasped and spluttered, his figure lost its tenseness, and from the fit of coughing he came back again an old and feeble man. He looked at his hand trembling against his waist, at his feet in their large and clumsy slippers; he looked at the picture of himself upon the wall, then quitted the room with something like a sob upon his lip.