ow) like the
blue harebell that nods upon our heather hills.

We might, for all I dreamt of the widow's brandy, have been conversing
on the stair-head yet, and my story had a different conclusion, had
not a step sounded on the stair, and up banged John Splendid, his
sword-scabbard clinking against the wall of the stair with the haste of
him.

"Set a cavalier at the side of an anker of brandy," he cried, "an----"

Then he saw he was in company. He took off his bonnet with a sweep I'll
warrant he never learned anywhere out of France, and plunged into the
thick of our discourse with a query.

"At your service, Mistress Brown," said he. "Half my errand to town
to-day was to find if young MacLach-lan, your relative, is to be at the
market here to-morrow. If so----"

"He is," said Betty.

"Will he be intending to put up here all night, then?"

"He comes to supper at least," said she, "and his biding overnight is
yet to be settled."

John Splendid toyed with the switch in his hand in seeming abstraction,
and yet as who was pondering on how to put an unwelcome message in
plausible language.

"Do you know," said he at last to the girl, in a low voice, for fear his
words should reach the ears of her mother in-bye, "I would as well see
MacLachlan out of town the morn's night. There's a waft of cold airs
about this place not particularly wholesome for any of his clan or name.
So much I would hardly care to say to himself; but he might take it
from you, madam, that the other side of the loch is the safest place for
sound sleep for some time to come."

"Is it the MacNicolls you're thinking of?" asked the girl.

"That same, my dear."

"You ken," he went on, turning fuller round to me, to tell a story he
guessed a new-comer was unlikely to know the ins and outs of--"you ken
that one of the MacLachlans, a cousin-german of old Lachie the chief,
came over in a boat to Braleckan a few weeks syne on an old feud, and
put a bullet into a Mac Nicoll, a peaceable lad who was at work in a
field. Gay times, gay times, aren't they? From behind a dyke wall too--a
far from gentlemanly escapade even in a MacLa---- Pardon, mistress;
I forgot your relationship, but this was surely a very low dog of his
kind. Now from that day to this the murtherer is to find; there are some
to say old Lachie could put his hand on him at an hour's notice if he
had the notion. But his lordship, Justiciar-General, upbye, has sent his
provost-marshal with l