“‘Do you know why I am so interested?’ she asked in a little, looking at me out of deep brown eyes in which I saw two little red-coated drummers, a thing which gave me back my vanity and made me answer her only with a smile. Her cheek for the first time reddened, and she hurried to explain. ‘They are Kildalton’s drums. Mr Fraser of Kildalton was my father, who is dead, and my mother is dead too; and I pleated and tied these cords and tassels first. How beautifully you keep them!’ “‘Well, Miss Fraser,’ said I, ‘I assure you I could not keep them better if I tried; but, after this, I shall have a better reason than ever for keeping them at their best,’ a soldier’s speech she smiled at as she turned away. As she went into the tall white house again she paused on the threshold and looked back for a moment at me, smiling, and for the first time since I took the bounty I rued my bargain, and thought I was meant for something more dignified than drumming. From that hour I lived in the eyes of Kildalton’s daughter Margory. Once a week we went fifing and drumming through the square. She was on these occasions never absent from her window; there was never a smile awanting for the smart young gentleman who beat the silver drum. A second and a third time she came into the square to speak to me. I made the most of my opportunities, and she was speedily made to discover in the humble drummer a fellow of race and education, a fellow with a touch of poetry, if you please. She was an orphan, as I have indicated—the ward of an uncle, a general, at the time abroad. She lived on the surviving fortune of Kildalton, in the tall white house, with an elderly aunt and a servant. At our third interview—we have a way of being urgent in the Army—she had trysted to meet me that evening in the wood behind the town. “Let me do the girl justice, and say that the drum of Kildalton brought her there, and not the drummer. At least, she was at pains to tell me so, for I had mentioned to her, with some of the gift of poetry I have mentioned, how infinitely varied were the possibilities of an instrument she would never have a proper chance to judge of in the routine of a fife-and-drum parade. “My billet was at the back of the town, on the verge of a wood, with the window of my room opening on a sort of hunting-path that went winding through the heart of what I have called a wood, but was in actual fact a forest of considerable dimensions. I went out by the window that evening with my drum, and walked, as had been arranged, about a mile among the trees till I came to a narrow glen that cleft the hills, a burn of shallow water from the peaty uplands bickering at the bottom of it. A half moon swung like a halbert over the heights that were edged by enormous fir-trees, and the wood was melancholy with the continuous call of owls. They were soon silenced, for I began to play the silver drum.