you are, maybe you are," said John, "and it's very fine of
you; and I'm not denying but I can fancy some admirable quality in the
character. But if I'm no great hand at the duty, I can swear to the
love."

"It's a word I hate to hear men using," said I.

The minister relaxed to a smile at John's amiability, and John smiled on
me.

"It's a woman's word, I daresay, Colin," said he; "but there's no
man, I'll swear, turning it over more often in his mind than yourself."

Where we lay, the Pap of Glencoe--Sgor-na-ciche, as they call it in
the Gaelic--loomed across Loch Leven in wisps of wind-blown grey.
Long-beaked birds came to the sand and piped a sharp and anxious note,
or chattered like children. The sea-banks floated on the water, rising
and dipping to every wave; it might well be a dream we were in on the
borderland of sleep at morning.

"What about Argile?" I asked again.

The minister said never a word. John Splendid rose to his feet, shook
the last of his annoyance from him, and cast an ardent glance to those
remote hills of Lorn.

"God's grandeur!" said he, turning to the Gaelic it was proper to
use but sparingly before a Saxon. "Behold the unfriendliness of those
terrible mountains and ravines! I am Gaelic to the core, but give me
in this mood of mine the flat south soil and the dip of the sky round a
bannock of country. Oh, I wish I were where Aora runs! I wish I saw the
highway of Loch Firme that leads down the slope of the sea where the
towns pack close together and fires are warm!" He went on and sang a
song of the low country, its multitude of cattle, its friendly hearths,
its frequented walks of lovers in the dusk and in the spring.

Sonachan and Ardkinglas and the tacksmen came over to listen, and the
man with the want began to weep with a child's surrender.

"And what about Argile?" said I, when the humming ceased.

"You are very keen on that bit, lad," said the baron-bailie, smiling
spitefully with thin hard lips that revealed his teeth gleaming white
and square against the dusk of his face. "You are very keen on that bit;
you might be waiting for the rest of the minister's story."

"Oh," I said, "I did not think there was any more of the minister's tale
to come. I crave his pardon."

"I think, too, I have not much more of a story to tell," said the
minister, stiffly.

"And I think," said M'Iver, in a sudden hurry to be off, "that we might
be moving from here. The head of the loch is the o