ave a sweetheart waiting
for you on your return?"

"I have yet to see the woman I would give a brass farthing to marry, or
for whose mess of connubial pottage I would sell my good bachelor's
birthright."

"Fegs," said Rollo Blair, gazing with admiration upon his shorter
companion, and, as was his wont when excited, relapsing into dialect,
"the shoe has aye pinched the ither foot wi' me, my lad. No to speak o'
Peggy Ramsay, I think I hae been disappointed by as mony as a round
dozen o' lasses since I shook off the dust o' the Lang Toon o'
Kirkcaldy."

"Disappointed?" queried his companion, "how so, man? Did you not please
the maids?"

"Oh, aye, it wasna that," returned the squire of Fife, taking his
companion's arm confidentially; "the lasses, to do justice to their good
taste, were maistly willing eneuch. There's something aboot a lang man
like me that tak's them, the craiturs, and I hae a way o' my ain wi'
them, though I never gat mair schooling than my father could thrash into
me wi' a dog whip. But the fact is that aye afore the thing gaed far
eneuch, I cam to words wi' some brither or faither o' the lass, and
maybe put a knife into him, or as it were an ounce o' lead, I wadna
wonder--to improve his logic."

"In other words you are quarrelsome?" said Mortimer shortly.

The Scot removed his hand from the Englishman's arm and drew himself to
his full height.

"There" he said, "I beg to take issue with you, sir! Argumentative I may
be, and it is my nature, but to the man who flings it in my teeth that I
am of a quarrelsome disposition, I have but one answer. Sir, receive my
card!"

And with great gravity he pulled from his pocket an ancient card-case of
damaged silver, bulged and dinted out of all shape, opened it, and burst
into a loud laugh.

"I declare I have not one left! I spent them all on those Aragonese dogs
down there, who thought, I daresay, that they were soup tickets on the
_frailuchos'_ kitchen up above. And anyway it is heaven's own truth, I
_am_ a quarrelsome, ungrateful dog! But forgive me, Mr. Mortimer, it is
my nature, and at any rate it does not last long. I am not yet of those
'that age and sullens have,' as my father used to say. A desperate wise
man my father, and well read! I would have learned more from him if I
had not preferred Sergeant McPherson and the stables, to the study and
my father's Malacca cane about my shoulders each time I made a false
quantity."

"But you have not an