shoulder.

"Are you thinking yourself----" he began, and what he would finish with
may be easily guessed. But M'Iver fixed him with an eye that pricked
like a rapier.

"Sit ye down, Stewart," said he; "your race is royal, as ye must be aye
telling us, but there's surely many a droll bye-blow in the breed."

"Are you not all from Appin?" asked the woman, with a new interest,
taking a corner of M'Iver's plaiding in her hand and running a few
checks through fine delicate fingers of a lady. Her face dyed crimson;
she drew back her stool a little, and cried out--

"That's not off a Stewart web--it was never waulked in Appin. Whom have
I here?"

John Splendid bent to her very kindly and laid a hand on hers.

"I'll tell you the God's truth, mother," said he; "we're broken men: we
have one Stewart of a kind with us, but we belong to parts far off from
here, and all we want is to get to them as speedily as may be. I'll put
you in mind (but troth I'm sure it's not needed) of two obligations that
lie on every Gaelic household. One of them is to give the shelter of the
night and the supper of the night to the murderer himself, even if the
corpse on the heather was your son; and the other is to ask no question
off your guest till he has drunk the _deoch-an-doruis_."

"I'm grudging you nothing," said the woman; "but a blind widow is
entitled to the truth and frankness."

M'Iver soothed her with great skill, and brought her back to her bairns.

"Ay," said he, "some day they'll be off your hands, and you the lady
with sons and servants."

"Had you a wife and bairns of your own," said the woman, "you might
learn some day that a parent's happiest time is when her children are
young. They're all there, and they're all mine when they're under the
blanket; but when they grow up and scatter, the nightfall never brings
them all in, and one pair of blankets will not cover the cares of them.
I do not know that," she went on, "from what I have seen in my own
house; but my mother told me, and she had plenty of chance to learn the
truth of it, with sons who died among strangers, and sons who bruised
her by their lives more than they could by their deaths."

"You have some very ruddy and handsome boys there," said M'Iver. And aye
he would be winking and smiling at the young rogues in the corner.

"I think they are," said the woman. "I never saw but the eldest, and he
was then at the breast, the dear, his father's image."

"Then the