"Ecod! I do remember now. There was a damned good mess-room joke about
him. When he was in the Blues they used to say his solemn face would
stop a merry-making. Well, after he had been in Austria a while they
told this on him; that his field-marshal had him listed for a majority,
and so he was presented to the empress. But when Maria Theresa saw him
she shrieked and cried out, '_Il est le père aux têtes rondes, lui-même!
Le portez-vous dehors!_' So he got but a captaincy after all; ha! ha!
ha!"

Now this was but a mess-room gibe, as he had said, cut out of unmarred
cloth, at that. Our Austrian Maria ever had a better word than
"roundhead" for her soldiers. But yet it stung, and stung the more
because I had and have the Ireton face, and that is unbeloved of women,
and glum and curst and solemn even when the man behind it would be
kindly. So when they laughed and chuckled at this jest, I lingered on
and listened with the better grace.

"What brought him over-seas, Sir Francis?" 'Twas not the grizzled jester
who asked, but the younger officer, his comrade.

Falconnet smiled as one who knows a thing and will not tell, and turned
to Gilbert Stair.

"What was it, think you, Mr. Stair?" he said, passing the question on.

At this they all looked to the master of Appleby Hundred, and I looked,
too. He was not the man I should have hit upon in any throng as the
reaver of my father's estate; still less the man who might be Margery's
father. He had the face of all the Stairs of Ballantrae without its
simple Scottish ruggedness; a sort of weasel face it was, with pale-gray