her lap, listening
with a sense so long at double exercise that now she could not readily
relax the strain on it M'Iver was in a great fidget to be off. I could
see it in every movement of him. He was a man who ever disliked to have
his feelings vexed by contact with the everlasting sorrows of life, and
this intercourse with new widowhood was sore against his mind. As for
me, I took, in a way of speaking, the woman to my heart She stood to me
for all the griefs I had known in life, and was yet the representative,
the figure of love--revealing an element of nature, a human passion so
different from those tumults and hatreds we had been encountering. I had
been thinking as I marched among the wilds of Lochaber and Badenoch
that vengeance and victory and dominion by the strong hand were the
main spurs to action, and now, on a sudden, I found that affection was
stronger than them all.

"Are you keeping the place on?" I asked the widow, "or do you go back to
your folks, for I notice from your tongue that you are of the North?"

"I'm of the Grants," she said; "but my heart's in Glencoe, and I'll
never leave it I am not grieving at the future, I am but minding on the
past, and I have my bairns.... More milk for the lads outside; stretch
your hands.... Oh yes, I have my bairns."

"Long may they prosper, mistress," said M'Iver, drumming with a horn
spoon on his knee, and winking and smiling very friendly to the little
fellows in a row in the bed, who, all but the oldest, thawed to this
humour of the stranger. "It must be a task getting a throng like yon
bedded at evening. Some day they'll be off your hand, and it'll be no
more the lullaby of Crodh Chailein, but them driving at the beasts for
themselves."

"Are you married?" asked the woman.

"No," said John, with a low laugh, "not yet. I never had the fortune to
fill the right woman's eye. I've waited at the ferry for some one who'll
take a man over without the ferry fee, for I'm a poor gentleman though
I'm of a good family, and had plenty, and the ones with the tocher won't
have me, and the tocherless girls I dare not betray."

"You ken the old word," said the woman; "the man who waits long at the
ferry will get over some day."

Stewart put down a cogie and loosened a button of his vest, and with an
air of great joviality, that was marred curiously by the odd look his
absence of lugs conferred, he winked cunningly at us and slapped the
woman in a rough friendship on the