time, and sat upon its banks and little thought life and time were
passing as quickly as the leaf or bubble on the surface. She flushed
ever so little at the remembrance, and threw a stray curl back from her
temples with an impatient toss of her fingers.

"And so much of the dandy too!" put in M'Iver, himself perjink enough
about his apparel. "I'll wager there's a girl in the business." He
laughed low, looked from one to the other of us, yet his meaning
escaped, or seemed to escape, the lady.

"Elrigmore is none of the kind," she said, as if to protect a child.
"He has too many serious affairs of life in hand to be in the humour for
gallivanting."

This extraordinary reading of my character by the one woman who ought to
have known it better, if only by an instinct, threw me into a blend of
confusion and chagrin. I had no answer for her. I regretted now that my
evil star had sent me up Glenaora, or that having met her with M'Iver,
whose presence increased my diffidence, I had not pretended some errand
or business up among the farmlands in the Salachry hills, where distant
relatives of our house were often found But now I was on one side of
the lady and M'Iver on the other, on our way towards the burgh, and the
convoy must be concluded, even if I were dumb all the way. Dumb, indeed,
I was inclined to be. M'Iver laughed uproariously at madame's notion
that I was too seriously engaged with life for the recreation of
love-making; it was bound to please him, coming, as it did, so close on
his own estimate of me as the Sobersides he christened me at almost our
first acquaintance. But he had a generous enough notion to give me the
chance of being alone with the girl he knew very well my feelings for.

"I've been up just now at the camp," he said, "anent the purchase of
a troop-horse, and I had not concluded my bargain when Mistress Brown
passed. I'm your true cavalier in one respect, that I must be offering
every handsome passenger an escort; but this time it's an office for
Elrigmore, who can undertake your company down the way bravely enough,
I'll swear, for all his blateness."

Betty halted, as did the other two of us, and bantered my comrade.

"I ask your pardon a thousand times, Barbreck," she said; "I thought you
were hurrying on your way down behind me, and came upon me before you
saw who I was."

"That was the story," said he, coolly; "I'm too old a hand at the
business to be set back on the road I came by a lady