us here," said the Cornal,
nudging his brother and nodding in Gilian's direction. "I've seen some
real diverts in my time, but he beats all. And you have a notion to
make a soger of him, they tell me. You heard that yourself, didn't you,
General?"

The General made no reply, for he was looking at the portrait of himself
when he was thirty-five, and to sit doing nothing in a house would have
been torture.

"I only said it in the by-going to Mary," explained the Paymaster
humbly. "The nature for sogering is the gift of God, and the boy may
have it or he may not; it is too soon to say."

"There's no more of the soger in him than there is of the writer in me!"
cried the Cornal; "but there's something by-ordinar in him all the same.
It's your affair, John, but--" He stopped short and looked again at
Gilian and hummed and ha'd a little and fingered his stock. "Man, do you
know I would not say but here's your son for you."

"That's what I thought myself," said the Paymaster, "and that's what I
said. I'll make him a soger if I can, and I'll make him hate the name of
Turner whether or not."

And all this time Gilian sat silently by, piecing out those scraps of
old men's passion with his child's fancy. He found this new world into
which he had been dragged, noisy, perplexing, interested apparently in
the most vague trifles. That they should lay out his future for warfare
and for hate, without any regard for his own wishes, was a little
alarming. Soldiering--with the man before him in the picture, sitting
propped up on his arms, frantic lest the horses should trample on
him--seemed the last trade on earth; as for hate, that might be easier
and due to his benefactor, but it would depend very much on the Turners.

When the brothers released him from their den, and he went to Miss Mary,
standing at the kitchen door, eager for his company, with a flush on her
cheek and a bright new ribbon at her neck, he laid those points before
her.

"Tuts!" said she, pressing food on him--her motherhood's only cure for
all a child's complaints--"they're only haverils. They cannot make a
soger of you against your will. As for the Turners--well, they're no
very likeable race, most of them in my mind. A dour, sour, up-setting
clan of no parentage. Perhaps that does not much matter, so long as
people are honest and well-doing; we are all equals before God except in
head and heart, but there's something too in our old Hielan' notion that
the clo