ee will, and there lives no father in the Highlands, or
out of them, that can force on this marriage. I will see that your
wishes are respected; I will make the same my business, as I have all
through. But I think you might have that decency as to affect some
gratitude. 'Deed, and I thought you knew me better! I have not behaved
quite well to you, but that was weakness. And to think me a coward and
such a coward as that--O, my lass, there was a stab for the last of it!"

"Davie, how would I guess?" she cried. "O, this is a dreadful business!
Me and mine,"--she gave a kind of wretched cry at the word--"me and mine
are not fit to speak to you. O, I could be kneeling down to you in the
street, I could be kissing your hands for your forgiveness!"

"I will keep the kisses I have got from you already," cried I. "I will
keep the ones I wanted and that were something worth; I will not be
kissed in penitence."

"What can you be thinking of this miserable girl?" says she.

"What I am trying to tell you all this while!" said I, "that you had
best leave me alone, whom you can make no more unhappy if you tried, and
turn your attention to James More, your father, with whom you are like
to have a queer pirn to wind."

"O, that I must be going out into the world alone with such a man!" she
cried, and seemed to catch herself in with a great effort. "But trouble
yourself no more for that," said she. "He does not know what kind of
nature is in 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 aga