‘Well, where’s the difference?’ ‘To be made sergeant shows that he was not a common man. If he had been, he would not have been set over others!’ ‘Of course he was then, and is now, a very respectable man. If he were not I should never have let you go and see him at all. But you must learn to behave like the gentleman you are, and that you never will while you frequent the company of your inferiors. Your manners are already almost ruined--fit for no place but a farmhouse! There you are, standing on the side of your foot again!--Old Barclay, I dare say, tells you no end of stories about your mother!’ ‘He always asks after you, mother, and then never mentions you more.’ She knew perfectly that the boy spoke the truth. ‘Don’t let me hear of your being there again before you go to school!’ she said definitively. ‘By the time you come home next year I trust your tastes will have improved. Go and make yourself tidy for dinner. A soldier’s son must before everything attend to his dress.’ Francis went to his room, feeling it absolutely impossible to have told his mother that he had been with Kirsty Barclay, that he had run a race with her, and that she had left him alone at the foot of the Horn. That he could not be open with his mother, no one that knew her unreasoning and stormy temper would have wondered; but the pitiful boy, who did not like lying, actually congratulated himself that he had got through without telling a downright falsehood! It would not have bettered matters in the least had he disclosed to her the good advice Kirsty gave him: she would only have been furious at the impudence of the hussey in talking so to _her_ son. CHAPTER III AT THE FOOT OF THE HORN