my heart. He will pay me dear for this day of it; dear,
dear will he pay."

She turned, and began to go home, and I to accompany her. At which she
stopped.

"I will be going alone," she said. "It is alone I must be seeing him."

Some little while I raged about the streets, and told myself I was the
worst-used lad in Christendom. Anger choked me; it was all very well for
me to breathe deep; it seemed there was not air enough about Leyden to
supply me, and I thought I would have burst like a man at the bottom of
the sea. I stopped and laughed at myself at a street-corner a minute
together, laughing out loud, so that a passenger looked at me, which
brought me to myself.

"Well," I thought, "I have been a gull and a ninny and a soft Tommy long
enough. Time it was done. Here is a good lesson to have nothing to do
with that accursed sex, that was the ruin of the man in the beginning,
and will be so to the end. God knows I was happy enough before ever I
saw her; God knows I can be happy enough again when I have seen the last
of her."

That seemed to me the chief affair: to see them go. I dwelled upon the
idea fiercely; and presently slipped on, in a kind of malevolence, to
consider how very poorly they were like to fare when David Balfour was
no longer by to be their milk-cow; at which, to my own very great
surprise, the disposition of my mind turned bottom up. I was still
angry; I still hated her; and yet I thought I owed it to myself that
she should suffer nothing.

This carried me home again at once, where I found the mails drawn out
and ready fastened by the door, and the father and daughter with every
mark upon them of a recent disagreement. Catriona was like a wooden
doll; James More breathed hard, his face was dotted with white spots,
and his nose upon one side. As soon as I came in, the girl looked at him
with a steady, clear, dark look that might very well have been followed
by a blow. It was a hint that was more contemptuous than a command, and
I was surprised to see James More accept it. It was plain he had had a
master talking-to; and I could see there must be more of the devil in
the girl than I had guessed, and more good-humour about the man than I
had given him the credit of.

He began, at least, calling me Mr. Balfour, and plainly speaking from a
lesson; but he got not very far, for at the first pompous swell of his
voice Catriona cut in.

"I will tell you what James More is meaning," said she. "He me