The Captain obeyed, and as he turned from the bookshelves Daisy took his hand again, and drew him, child-fashion, out of the house and through the shrubbery. He let her alone till she had brought him to a shady spot, where under the thick growth of magnificent trees a rustic seat stood, in full view of the distant mountains and the river. "Where is my answer, Daisy?" he said, as she let go his hand and seated herself. "What was your question, Capt. Drummond?" "Now you are playing hide and seek with me. What have those words you shewed me,--what have they to do with our yesterday's conversation?" "I would like to know," said Daisy slowly, "what it means, to be a good soldier?" "Why?" "I think I have told you," she said. She said it with the most unmoved simplicity. The Captain could not imagine what made him feel uncomfortable. He whistled. "Daisy, you are incomprehensible!" he exclaimed, and catching hold of her hand, he began a race down towards the river. Such a race as they had taken the day before. Through shade and through sun, down grassy steeps and up again, flying among the trees as if some one were after them, the Captain ran; and Daisy was pulled along with him. At the edge of the woods which crowned the river bank, he stopped and looked at Daisy who was all flushed and sparkling with exertion and merriment. "Sit down there!" said he, putting her on the bank and throwing himself beside her. "Now you look as you ought to look!" "I don't think mamma would think so," said Daisy panting and laughing. "Yes, she would. Now tell me--do you call yourself a soldier?" "I don't know whether there can be such little soldiers," said Daisy. "If there can be, I am." "And what fighting do you expect to do, little one?" "I don't know," said Daisy. "Not very well." "What enemies are you going to face?" But Daisy only looked rather hard at the Captain and made him no answer. "Do you expect to emulate the charge of the Light Brigade, in some tilt against fancied wrong?" Daisy looked at her friend; she did not quite understand him, but his last words were intelligible. "I don't know," she said meekly. "But if I do it will not be because the order is a _mistake_, Capt. Drummond." The Captain bit his lip. "Daisy," said he, "are you the only soldier in the family?" Daisy sat still, looking up over the sunny slopes of ground towards the house. The sunbeams shewed it bright and stately on the higher ground; they poured over a rich luxuriant spread of greensward and trees, highly kept; stately and fair; and Daisy could not help remembering that in all that domain, so far as she knew, there was not a thought in any heart of being the sort of soldier she wished to be. She got up from the ground and smoothed her dress down. "Capt. Drummond," she said with a grave dignity that was at the same time perfectly childish too,--"I have told you about myself--I can't tell you about other people." "Daisy, you are not angry with me!" "No sir."