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After this the days were tolerably well filled. There was a dinner to the neighbouring gentry, and a dinner to the tenantry. There was a ball. There was a great supper in tents to the labourers and cottagers on the estate; finally, there was a vast entertainment for the school children in the united parishes of Bellendean and Prince’s Ferry. The Colonel went through them all manfully. He carried out his original impulse, shook hands with everybody, and said, ‘I assure you he’s a capital fellow.’ ‘I had him under my command at So-and-so, and So-and-so, and I know what’s in him.’ In this way Colonel Hayward was himself a great success. The old county neighbours liked the assurance he gave them, and the farmers delighted in it. And when it came to the turn of the masses, and the old soldier went about among the tables at the labourers’ supper repeating his formula, the enthusiasm was immense. ‘Eh, Cornel, but that’s a real satisfaction,’ the old men said. ‘Sae lang as he’s done his duty, what can mortal man do mair?’ His own assurances and reassurances went to the good Colonel’s head. He felt like a trumpeter whose note was the word of command to everybody, and marched about with his head high. ‘I assure you he’s a capital fellow, a capital fell——’ He was in the very act of repeating them, when the words seemed to fail him all at once. He stopped in the middle with his mouth open, and gazed at some one who at that moment for the first time caught his eye.