When Ronald Kilsyth was little more than four years old his nurses said he was "so odd;" a phrase which stuck by him through life. As a child his oddity consisted in his curious gravity and preoccupation, his insensibility to amusement, his dislike of companionship, his love of solitude, his old-fashioned thoughts and manner and habits. He had a dogged honesty which prevented him from using the smallest deception in any way, which prevented him from ever prevaricating or telling those small fibs which are made so much of in the child, but to which he looks back as trivial sins indeed when compared with the duplicity of his after-life,--which rendered him obnoxious even to the children whom he met as playfellows in the square-garden, and who found it impossible to get on with young Kilsyth on account of the rigidity of his morals, displeasing to them even at their tender years. When a delicious guetapens, made of string stretched from tree to tree, had been, with great consumption of time and trouble, prepared for the downfall of the old gardener; and when the youthful conspirators were all laid up in ambush behind the Portugal laurels, waiting to see the old man, plodding round with rake and leaf-basket in the early dusk of the autumnal evening, fall headlong over the snare,--it was provoking to see little Ronald Kilsyth, in his gray kilt, step out and go up to the old man and show him the pitfall, and assist him in removing it. The conspirators were highly incensed at this treachery, as they called it, and would have sent Ronald then and there to Coventry,--not that that would have distressed him much,--had it not been for his magnanimity in refusing, even when under pressure, to give up the names of those in the plot. But as in this, so in everything else; and the little frequenters of the square soon found Ronald Kilsyth "too good" for them, and were by no means anxious to secure his companionship in their sports.  
At Eton, whither he was sent so soon as he arrived at the proper age, he very shortly obtained the same character. Pursuing the strict path of duty,--industrious, punctual, and regular, with very fair abilities, and scrupulously making the most of them,--he never lost an opportunity and never made a friend. All that was good of him his masters always said; but they stopped there; they never said anything that was kind. In school they could not help respecting him; out of school they would as soon have thought of making Ronald Kilsyth their companion as of taking Hind's Algebra for pleasant reading. And it was the same with his schoolfellows. They talked of his steadiness and of his hard-working with pride, as reflecting on themselves and the whole school. They speculated as to what he would do in the future, and how he would show that the stories that had been told about Eton were all lies, don't you know? and how Kilsyth would go up to Cambridge, and show them what the best public school--the only school for English gentlemen, you know--could do; and Floreat Etona, and all that kind of thing, old fellow. But Ronald Kilsyth, during the whole of his Eton pupilage, never had a chum--never knew what it was to share a confidence, add to a pleasure, or lighten a grief. Did he feel this? Perhaps more acutely than could have been imagined; but being, as he was, proud, shy, sensitive, and above all queer, he took care that no one knew what his feelings were, or whether he had any at all on the subject.
 
Queer! that was the word by which they called him at Eton, and which, after all, expressed his disposition better than any other. Strong-minded, clear-headed, generous, and brave, with an outer coating of pride, shyness, reserve, and a mixture of all which passed current for hauteur. With a strong contempt for nearly everything in which his contemporaries found pleasure,--save in the excess of exercise, as that he thoroughly understood and appreciated,--and with a wearying desire to find pleasure for himself; with an impulse to exertion and work, accountable to himself only on the score of duty, but having no definite end or aim; with a restless longing to make his escape from the thraldom of conventionality, and rush off and do something somewhere far away from the haunts of men. With all the morbidness of the hero of Locksley Hall, without the excuse of having been jilted, and without any of the experience of that sweetly modulated cynic, Ronald Kilsyth, obeying his father's wish, and thereby again following the paths of duty, was gazetted to the Life-Guards--the exact position for a young gentleman in his condition.
 
The donning of a scarlet tunic instead of a round jacket, and the substitution of a helmet for a pot-hat, made very little difference in Ronald. Several of his brother officers had known him personally at Eton, so that the character he had obtained there preceded him, inspiring a wholesome awe of him before he appeared on the scene; and he had not been two days in barracks before he was voted a prig and a bore. There was no sympathy between the dry, pedantic, rough young Scotsman and those jolly genial youths. His hard, dry, handsome clean-cut face, with its cold gray eyes, thin aquiline nose, and tight lips, cast a gloom over the cheery mess-table around which they sat; their jovial beaming smiles, and curling moustaches, and glittering shirt-studs reflected in the silver épergne, with its outposts of mounted sentries and its pleasant mingling of feasting and frays at the Temple of Mars and the London Tavern. His grim presence robbed many a pleasant story of its point, which indeed, in deference to him, had to be softened down or given with bated breath. The young fellows--no younger than him in years, but with, O, such an enormous gulf between them as regards the real elasticity and charm of youth--were afraid of him, and from fear sprung dislike. They had not much fear of their elders, these youths of ingenuous countenance and ingenuous modesty. They had a wholesome awe, tempering their hearty love, of Colonel Jefferson; but less on account of the strictness of his discipline and of a certain noli-me-tangere expression towards those whom he did not specially favour, than on account of his age; and as for the jolly old Major, who had been in the regiment for ever so many years,--for him they had neither fear nor respect; and when he was in command--which befell him during the cheerful interval between July and December--the lads did as they liked.
 
But they could not get on with Ronald Kilsyth; and though they tolerated him quietly for the sake of his people, they never could be induced to regard him with anything like the fraternal good fellowship which they entertained towards each other. As it had been at Eton, so it was at Knightsbridge, at Windsor, in Albany-street, in all those charming quarters where the Household Cavalry spend their time for their own and their country's advantage. Ronald Kilsyth was respected by all, loved by none. Charley Jefferson himself, fascinated as he was by Ronald's devotion to the mysteries of drill and by all the young man's unswerving attention to his regimental duties--qualities which weighed immensely with the martinet Colonel--had been heard to confess, with a prolonged twirl at his grizzled moustache, that "Kilsyth was a d--d hard nut to crack,"--an enigmatic remark which, from so plain a speaker as the Colonel, meant volumes. The Major, whom Ronald, under strong provocation, had once designated a "tipsy old atheist," had, in the absence of his enemy and under the influence of two-thirds of a bottle of brandy, retorted in terms which were held to justify both Ronald's epithets; and the men had a very low opinion of him, who at the time of writing was senior lieutenant of the regiment. He had no sympathy with the men, no care for them; he would have liked to have made them more domestic, less inclined for the public-house and the music-hall; he would have subscribed to reading-rooms, to institutes, to anything for their mental improvement; but he never thought of giving them a kind word or an encouraging speech; and they much preferred Cornet Bosky--who cursed them roundly for their talking, for their silence, for their going too fast, for their going too slow, for their anything in fact, on those horrible mornings when he happened to be in charge of them exercising their horses, but who off duty always had a kindly word, an open purse at their service--to the senior Lieutenant, who never used a bad expression, and who, as they confessed, was, after the Colonel, the best soldier in the regiment.
 
It was like going into a different world to leave the smoky atmosphere, the wild disorder and reckless confusion of most of the other rooms in barracks, and go into Ronald Kilsyth's trim orderly apartment. Instead of tables ringed with stains of long-since-emptied tumblers, and littered with yellow-paper-covered French novels, torn playbills, old gloves, letters, unpaid bills, opera-glasses, pipes, shreds of tobacco, heaps of cigar-ash, rolls of comic songs, trophies from knock'em-downs at race-courses, empty soda-water bottles, scattered packs of cards, and suchlike examples of free living--to find perfect order and decorum; the walls covered with movable bookcases filled with valuable books, Raphael Morghen prints, proofs before letters after the best modern artists, and charming bits of water-colour sketches, instead of coloured daubs of French écuyères and lionnes of the Quartier Breda, photographs of Roman temple or Pompeian excavation, and Venetian glass and delicate eggshell china, and Chinese carving, and Indian beadwork. They used to look round at these things in wonder, the other young fellows of the regiment, when they penetrat............