a wide name for unflinching bravery of a kind he had been generally
acknowledged as sadly want ing in before. And Mistress Betty could not
but see that high or low, I was second to this fellow going off--or at
least with the rumour of it--to Hebron's cavaliers in France before the
week-end.

M'Iver was just, perhaps, carrying his humour at my cost a little too
far for my temper, which was never readily stirred, but flamed fast
enough when set properly alowe, and Betty--here too your true woman
wit--saw it sooner than he did himself, quick enough in the uptake
though he was. He had returned again to his banter about the
supposititious girl I was trysted with up the glen, and my face showed
my annoyance.

"You think all men like yourself," said the girl to him, "and all women
the same--like the common soldier you are."

"I think them all darlings," he confessed, laughing; "God bless them,
kind and foolish----"

"As you've known them oftenest," she supplied, coldly.

"Or sedate and sensible," he went on. "None of them but found John
M'Iver of Barbeck their very true cavalier."

"Indeed," said Mistress Betty, colder than ever, some new thought
working within her, judging from the tone. "And yet you leave to-morrow,
and have never been to Carlunnan." She said the last words with a
hesitancy, blushing most warmly. To me they were a dark mystery, unless
I was to assume, what I did wildly for a moment, only to relinquish the
notion immediately, that she had been in the humour to go visiting
her friends with him. Mover's face showed some curious emotion that it
baffled me to read, and all that was plain to me was that here were two
people with a very strong thought of a distressing kind between them.

"It would be idle for me," he said in a little, "to deny that I know
what you mean. But do you not believe you might be doing me poor justice
in your suspicions?"

"It is a topic I cannot come closer upon," she answered; "I am a woman.
That forbids me and that same compels me. If nature does not demand your
attendance up there, then you are a man wronged by rumour or a man dead
to every sense of the human spirit I have listened to your humour and
laughed at your banter, for you have an art to make people forget; but
all the way I have been finding my lightness broken in on by the feeble
cry of a child without a mother--it seems, too, without a father."

"If that is the trouble," he said, turning away with a smile he did