"I have the honour to be, &c., &c. "Major the Hon. C. Crawford, &c., &c." "A fortnight!--are we to have you only for a fortnight, my dear, dear Cosmo?" exclaimed Lady Rohallion, all her maternal tenderness welling up at once. "You will not, I fear, have me so long, my dear mother," said he; "and you, Flora," he added in a low voice, as he purposely held his plate across her for a wing of grouse; "and you----" "Give you full leave to go, with my dearest wishes, and your heart unbroken. Come, Cosmo," she added in the same low voice, and with a soft smile; "let us part friends, at least." Cosmo's eyes seemed to shrink and dilate, while a cold and haughty smile spread over his otherwise handsome features, as he turned quietly to discuss his grouse, and said to the butler,-- "Spillsby, tell the groom to have a horse saddled for my man--take Minden, the bay mare--as I must despatch a letter to Maybole within an hour." Breakfast was hurried over in silence and constraint, then Cosmo, kissing the brow of his mother, who was already in tears,--for the only real emotion that lingered in the Master's heart was a regard for his mother--played with the silk tassels of his luxurious dressing-gown, and lounged into the library to write his answer to the military secretary, and profess himself to be completely, as in duty bound, at the disposal of His Royal Highness, and proud to accept the command offered him. He soon penned the letter, and sealed it with the coronet, the shield _gules_ and fess _ermine_ of Rohallion, muttering as he did so,-- "The line--the line after all; a horrid bore indeed, to come down to that!" He threw open his dressing-gown, as if it stifled him, almost tearing the tasselled girdle as he did so, and planting his foot on the buhl writing-table, lounged back in an easy-chair, where he strove to read up Sir David Dundas's "Eighteen Manoeuvres," and fancied how he would handle his battalion without clubbing the companies or bringing the rear rank in front; by taking them into action with snappers instead of flints, as old Whitelock did at Buenos Ayres, or committing other little blunders, which might prove very awkward if a brigade of French twelve-pounders were throwing in grape and canister at half-musket range. Soothed by pipe, and by the silence of the place, and by the subdued sunlight that stole through the deep windows of that old library, so quaint with its oak shelves of calf-bound and red-labelled folios and quartos, its buhl cabinets, and square-backed chairs of the Covenanting days, its half-curtained oriel window, through which were seen the ripe corn or stubble fields that stretched in distance far away to the brown hills of Carrick. Soothed, we say, by all this, Cosmo dawdled over the pages and the diagrams of the famous review at Potsdam for some time before he became conscious that Flora was seated near him, busy with a book of engravings.