state's
precarious (it's needless to delude ourselves otherwise), and our friend
Sandy and his bloody gang may be at a javelin's throw from us as we sit
here. I wish--"

He saw the girl's face betray her natural alarm, and amended his words
almost too quickly for the sake of the illusion.

"Tuts, tuts!" he cried. "I forgot the wood was searched before, and
here I'm putting a dismal black face on a drab business. We might be a
thousand times worse. I might be a clay-cold corp with my last week's
wage unspent in my sporran, as it happens to be, and here I'm to
the fore with four or five MacDonalds to my credit If I've lost my
mercantile office as mine-manager (curse your trades and callings!) my
sword is left me; you have equal fortune, Elrigmore; and you, Mistress
Brown, have them you love spared to you."

Again the girl blushed most fiercely. "Thank God! Thank God!" she cried
in a stifled ecstasy, "and O! but I'm grateful." And anew she fondled
the little bye-blow as it lay with its sunny hair on the soldier's
plaid.

John glanced at her from the corners of his eyes with a new expression,
and asked her if she was fond of bairns.

"Need you ask that of a woman?" she said. "But for the company of this
one on my wanderings, my heart had failed me a hundred times a-day. It
was seeing him so helpless that gave me my courage: the dark at night in
the bothy and the cot and the moaning wind of this lone spot had sent me
crazy if I had not this little one's hand in mine, and his breath in my
hair as we lay together."

"To me," said John, "they're like flowers, and that's the long and the
short of it."

"You're like most men, I suppose," said Betty, archly; "fond of them in
the abstract, and with small patience for the individuals of them. This
one now--you would not take half the trouble with him I found a delight
in. But the nursing of bairns--even their own--is not a soldier's
business."

"No, perhaps not," said M'Iver, surveying her gravely; "and yet I've
seen a soldier, a rough hired cavalier, take a wonderful degree of
trouble about a duddy little bairn of the enemy in the enemy's country.
He was struck--as he told me after--by the look of it sitting in a scene
of carnage, orphaned without the sense of it, and he carried it before
him on the saddle for a many leagues' march till he found a peaceful
wayside cottage, where he gave it in the charge of as honest a woman, to
all appearance, as these parts could boast