He might even--for all I know
to the contrary--have fairly bought her attention for it by a season's
paying of the kreutzers, and I know it cost him a duel with a fool who
mocked the sentiment of the deed."

"I hope so brave and good a man was none the worse for his duel in a
cause so noble," said the girl, softly.

"Neither greatly brave nor middling good," said John, laughing, "at
least to my way of thinking, and I know him well. But he was no poorer
but by the kreutzers for his advocacy of an orphan bairn."

"I think I know the man," said I, innocently, "and his name would be
John."

"And John or George," said the girl, "I could love him for his story."

M'Iver lifted a tress of the sleeping child's hair and toyed with it
between his fingers.

"My dear, my dear!" said he; "it's a foolish thing to judge a man's
character by a trifle like yon: he's a poor creature who has not his
fine impulse now and then; and the man I speak of, as like as not, was
dirling a wanton flagon (or maybe waur) ere nightfall, or slaying with
cruelty and zest the bairn's uncles in the next walled town he came to.
At another mood he would perhaps balance this lock of hair against a
company of burghers but fighting for their own fire-end."

"The hair is not unlike your own," said Betty, comparing with quick eyes
the curl he held and the curls that escaped from under the edge of his
flat blue bonnet.

"May every hair of his be a candle to light him safely through a mirk
and dangerous world," said he, and he began to whittle assiduously at a
stick, with a little black oxter-knife he lugged from his coat.

"Amen!" said the girl, bravely; "but he were better with the guidance
of a good father, and that there seems small likelihood of his
enjoying--poor thing!"

A constraint fell on us; it may have been there before, but only now I
felt it myself. I changed the conversation, thinking that perhaps
the child's case was too delicate a subject, but unhappily made
the plundering of our glens my dolorous text, and gloom fell like a
mort-cloth on our little company. If my friend was easily uplifted, made
buoyantly cheerful by the least accident of life, he was as prone to a
hellish melancholy when fate lay low. For the rest of the afternoon he
was ever staving with a gloomy brow about the neighbourhood, keeping an
eye, as he said, to the possible chance of the enemy.

Left thus for long spaces in the company of Betty and the child, that
daffe