ensitive soul, I have sometimes
felt an envy of their fortune. To me the world was almost mirthful if
its good-byes came less frequent. Cold and heat, the contumely of the
slanderer, the insult of the tyrant, the agues and fevers of the flesh,
the upheavals of personal fortune, were events a robust man might face
with calm valiancy if he could be spared the cheering influence of the
homely scene or the unchanged presence of his familiars and friends. I
have sat in companies and put on an affected mirth, and laughed and sung
with the most buoyant of all around, and yet ever and anon I chilled at
the intruding notion of life's brevity.

Thus my leaving town Inneraora--its frozen hearths, its smokeless vents,
its desecrated doorways, and the few of my friends who were back to
it--was a stupendous grief. My father and my kinspeople were safe--we
had heard of them by the returners from Lennox; but a girl with dark
tresses gave me a closer passion for my native burgh than ever I felt
for the same before. If love of his lady had been Argile's reason for
retreat (thought I), there was no great mystery in his act.

What enhanced my trouble was that Clan MacLachlan--as Catholics always
safe to a degree from the meddling of the invaders--had re-established
themselves some weeks before in their own territory down the loch, and
that young Lachlan, as his father's proxy, was already manifesting a
guardian's interest in his cousin. The fact came to my knowledge in a
way rather odd, but characteristic of John Splendid's anxiety to save
his friends the faintest breeze of ill-tidings.

We were up early betimes in the morning of our departure for Lorn,
though our march was fixed for the afternoon, as we had to await the
arrival of some officers from Ceanntyre; and John and I, preparing our
accoutrements, began to talk of the business that lay heaviest at my
heart--the leaving of the girl we had found in Strongara wood.

"The oddest thing that ever happened to me," he said, after a while,
"is that in the matter of this child she mothers so finely she should
be under the delusion that I have the closest of all interests in its
paternity. Did you catch her meaning when she spoke of its antecedents
as we sat, the four of us, behind the fir-roots?"

"No, I can't say that I did," said I, wonderingly.

"You're not very gleg at some things, Elrigmore," he said, smiling.
"Your Latin gave you no clue, did it, to the fact that she thought John