“I didn’t want the girl I intended to marry and pass my life with to have her head turned by such trappings as a Sam Browne belt.  She has had to be taught that she is going to marry a man.  I’m not such a fool as you may have thought me, Major,” he said, forgetful of his humble rank.  “Suppose I had got a commission and married her.  Suppose I had been kept at home and never gone out and never seen a shot fired, like heaps of other fellows, or suppose I had taken the line I had marked out—­do you think we should have been assured a happy life?  Not a bit of it.  We might have been happy for twenty years.  And then—­women are women and can’t help themselves—­the old word—­by George, sir, she spat it at me from a festering sore in her very soul—­the old word would have rankled all the time, and some stupid quarrel having arisen, she would have spat it at me again.  I wasn’t taking any chances of that kind.”

“My dear boy,” said I, subridently, “you seem to be very wise.”  And he did.  So far as I knew anything about humans, male and female, his proposition was incontrovertible.  “But where did you gather your wisdom?”

“I suppose,” he replied seriously, “that my mind is not entirely unaffected by a very expensive education.”

I looked at the extraordinary figure in sheepskin, bundles and mud, and laughed out loud.  The hands of Esau and the voice of Jacob.  The garb of Thomas Atkins and the voice of Balliol.  Still, as I say, the fellow was perfectly right.  His highly trained intelligence had led him to an exact conclusion.  The festering sore demanded drastic treatment,—­the surgeon’s knife.  As we talked I saw how coldly his brain had worked.  And side by side with that working I saw, to my amusement, the insistent claims of his vanity.  The quickest way to the front, where alone he could re-establish his impugned honour was by enlistment in the regular army.  For the first time in his life he took a grip on essentials.  He knew that by going straight into the heart of the old army his brains, provided they remained in his head, would enable him to accomplish his purpose.  As for his choice of regiment, there his vanity guided.  You may remember that after his disappearance we first heard of him at Aberdeen.  Now Aberdeen is the depot of the Gordon Highlanders.

“What on earth made you go there?” I asked.

“I wanted to get among a crowd where I wasn’t known, and wasn’t ever likely to be known,” he replied.  “And my instinct was right.  I was among farmers from Skye and butchers from Inverness and drunken scallywags from the slums of Aberdeen, and a leaven of old soldiers from all over Scotland.  I had no idea that such people existed.  At first I thought I shouldn’t be able to stick it.  They gave me a bad time for being an Englishman.  But soon, I think, they rather liked me.  I set my brains to work and made ’em like me.  I knew there was everything to learn about these fellows and I went scientifically to work to learn it.  And, by Heaven, sir, when once they accepted me, I found I had never been in such splendid company in my life.”