his arm away; but I had already caught him. They tried to look
mighty unconcerned as I pulled up. I took off my hat politely to
the lady and held out my hand to the young man.

"Good evening, Randall," said I. "I haven't seen you for ages."

He was a tall, clean-limbed, clear-featured boy, with black hair,
which though not long, yet lacked the military trimness befitting
the heads of young men at the present moment. He murmured
something about being busy.

"It will do you good to take a night off," I said; "drop in after
dinner and smoke a pipe with an old friend."

I smiled, bowed again politely, whipped up Hosea and trotted off.
I wondered whether he would come. He had said: "Delighted, I'm
sure," but he had not looked delighted. Very possibly he regarded
me as a meddlesome, gossiping old tom-cat. Perhaps for that reason
he would deem it wise to adopt a propitiatory attitude. Perhaps
also he retained a certain affectionate respect for me, seeing
that I had known him as a tiny boy in a sailor suit, and had fed
him at Harrow (as I did poor Oswald Fenimore at Wellington) with
Mrs. Marigold's famous potted shrimp and other comestibles, and
had put him up, during here and there holidays and later a
vacation, when his mother and aunts, with whom he lived, had gone
abroad to take inefficacious cures for the tedium of a futile
life. Oxford, however, had set him a bit off my plane.

As an ordinary soldierman, trained in the elementary virtues of
plain-speaking and direct dealing, love of country and the