time he was not so over
strait-laced as to take offence at what she said; indeed, as he used to
say, sins were not so heinous in those papistical days as they
afterwards became, when men lost faith in penance, and found out the
perils of purchased pardons.

CHAPTER VII

My grandfather having, as I have told, a compassion for the silly
affection wherewith the honest man of Crail still regarded his wanton
wife, told him the circumstantials of his adventure with the stripling;
without, however, letting wot he had discovered that the invitation was
from her; the which was the case, for the damsel who looked out at the
window was no other than the giglet he had seen in her lodging when he
went thither with Sir David Hamilton, and he proposed to the
disconsolate husband that he should be his friend in the adventure;
meaning thereby to convince the unhappy man, by the evidence of his own
eyes and ears, that her concubinage with the Antichrist was a blessed
riddance to him and his family.

At first Master Kilspinnie had no zest for any such frolic, for so it
seemed to him, and he began to think my grandfather's horror at the
martyrdom of the aged saint but a long-fac't hypocrisy; nevertheless he
was wrought upon to consent; and they sat plotting and contriving in
what manner they should act their several parts, my grandfather
pretending great fear and apprehension at the thoughts of himself, a
stranger, going alone into the traps of a house where there were sic
forerunners of shame and signs of danger. At last he proposed that they
should go together and spy about the precincts of the place, and try to
discover if there was no other entrance or outgate to the house than the
way by which the stripling conducted him, though well he remembered the
sallyport, where the fat friar kept watch, eating the pasty.

Accordingly they went forth from the vintner's, and my grandfather, as
if he knew not the way, led his companion round between the priory and
the sea, till they came near the aforesaid sallyport, when, mounting
upon a stone, he affected to discover that the house of the madam stood
in the garden within, and that the sallyport could be no less than a
back yett thereto.

While they were speaking concerning the same, my grandfather observed
the wicket open in the gate, and guessing therefrom that it was one
spying to forewarn somebody within who wanted to come out unremarked, he
made a sign to his companion, and th