Falconer thought he was only to hear about her past and pet memories of the corps; but he did not foresee that he must hear much more that he would rather not have heard at all. Nor could he suspect that her primary object was to get him alone for her own well-meant purpose, or, as she deemed it, his future peace of mind and the welfare of Mary Montgomerie. 'This is my peculiar sanctum, Mr. Falconer,' said she, when ushering him into a cosily and handsomely-furnished parlour, 'and here I keep all my relics of the dead and of other times, and have done so since I found a happy and contented home in Eaglescraig,' she added, glancing at an old iron-bound baggage-trunk that had been at Bengal, China, Bermuda, and all round the world with the Cameronians, and at two regimental swords crossed upon the wall: one the weapon of her husband, the other that of her son, a joyous boyish ensign, who had fallen in a vile skirmish with a hill-tribe; shot under the colours, on a day when match-lock balls were flying thick, and 'human lives were lavished everywhere.' And there now hung the sword that had failed him in the hot hour of trial. Over the old but handsome face of Mrs. Garth, there spread an expression of sweetness and sadness mingled, as she showed Falconer the miniatures of her husband and their dead soldier-son; the latter as an infant, with a lock of his golden hair, which she had worn at her heart for twenty years and more, treasured, like all his school-boy letters, in the sad but loving superstition of the heart, in memory of him and of that day when the troops fell in and he went with the Cameronians 'to the front,' to be brought back to her across six muskets, mortally wounded, to die, while calling on her name, thanking her for her love, and dying with his head upon her breast, as calmly as he had fallen asleep there when an infant. And so he died thus, as his father had died but a few weeks before him. 'The will of God be done!' said Mrs. Garth, in a sorely broken voice; 'for it was His will that I was to lose them, and that they were to precede me. But Heaven is just, and teaches us that there is a brighter and a better world than this!'