So she told herself that she was no judge of what a gentleman's dress or deportment should be, and turned at the sound of a footstep coming through the archway of the keep behind her to greet the newcomer with a more effusive welcome than she would otherwise have given the young man who came towards her carrying a valise on his shoulder. He set down his burden and grasped her outstretched hand in a sort of transport. "Ah, Marrion--Marrion, my lass!" he cried. "God, but it's gude to see you once mair!" The words summed him up from the crown of his head to the tips of his toes. You might have spent long hours in analysing Andrew Fraser's mind and body at that particular moment, and you would have got no nearer the mark, since for the time being existence was sheer gladness because of the sight of a woman. "And I've brocht him safe home as ye bade me when I joined. Ye'll have seen him yerself. He's fine, isn't he?" There was a world of pride in his tone; the pride of the soldier-servant who is responsible for the smartness of his master's outturn. "Aye!" assented Marrion, grimly recognising that the figure before her was more to her mind in some ways than the other which had gone swaggering through the quadrangle. This one was broader in the chest, simpler in its ugly angular face and small pathetic-looking blue eyes, and simple--oh, so irritatingly simple!--in the devotion writ large in its every look, its every intonation. "Well, I'm glad you're both home safe," she said, putting the barrier of refined speech between them. Then a resentment, of which she was innately ashamed even while she yielded to it, made her add: "And I suppose you've brought home a wife on the strength of the regiment?" Andrew Fraser stared for a second, then shouldered his valise again deftly-- "Ye ken fine, Marrion Paul," he said sternly, as he went on, "that there never was but ae woman in the wurrld for me, an' never will be." And so he left her feeling small and mean. She watched him across the courtyard following on his master's steps. A fine figure of a man. No swagger there, nothing to clash with the grey old walls. But that made no difference, no difference at all. That was the worst of it. CHAPTER II