“I can well believe it,” said Kirsteen; “nevertheless, if it was Jeanie he was meaning, though it may be all true, it did not need that to make a lady of my sister,” she said with an ineffable visionary pride. The major did not argue, or make any stand for his part, though he had all the enthusiasm of an early member of the sect. He would have indeed sacrificed Wordsworth and all the poets without a thought at the shrine he was approaching. “That is, alas, what daunts me,” he said. “How am I, a poor man, to make your father hear me? He will want, and well I know how justly, what I have not to give.” “I am no authority as to what my father will do, Major Gordon. You may have heard why I, a Douglas, and not the least proud of the family, am here.” “But she adores you, Miss Kirsteen!” “Does she that? My bonny Jeanie! And well I wot she is the dearest thing to me.” Kirsteen paused with a flood of pleasure and anguish inundating her heart. The visions of the past rose up before her. Ah, why had the image of the little sister come so persistently into all her dreams of a future that was never to be? Because, she said to herself, putting down that climbing sorrow, it was a life that was never to be--and Jeanie was the consolation that remained. “Major Gordon,” she said, “if it may so be that Jeanie’s happiness is bound up in yours, all that I can do will be too little. But what is there that I can do? She is in the hands of her parents; and I that have broken my bonds, and am a rebel, having nothing to say.” “It will not last like that between them and you.” “It has lasted for six years. My father is a dour man and does not change. If Alexander were to come back, that is the next in the family to my father--” “He is coming, he is coming--when men in India speak of two or three years they think it is nothing--but it’s an eternity to me.” “And sometimes it is an eternity,” Kirsteen said solemnly. She asked then suddenly, without intending it, if he had ever been at Ahmednugger where the battle was. “I was in the battle,” he said simply. “I had my orders home, but I was there. It was a kind of chance, no one expected it.”