injured.

M'Iver helped me on with my coat.

"You're far too soft, man!" he said. "You would have let him go
scathless, and even now he has less than his deserts. You have a pretty
style of fence, do you know, and I should like to see it paraded against
a man more your equal."

"You'll never see it paraded by me," I answered, sorrowfully. "Here's my
last duello, if I live a thousand years." And I went up and looked at my
fallen adversary. He was shivering with cold, though the sweat hung upon
the young down of his white cheeks, for the night air was more bitter
every passing moment The sun was all down behind the hills, the
valley was going to rest, the wood was already in obscurity. If our
butcher-work had seemed horrible in that sanctuary in the open light of
day, now in the eve it seemed more than before a crime against Heaven.
The lad weltering, with no word or moan from his lips; the servant
stanching his wound, shaken the while by brotherly tears; M'Iver, the
old man-at-arms, indifferent, practised to such sights, and with the
heart no longer moved by man-inflicted injury; and over all a brooding
silence; over all that place, consecrated once to God and prayer by men
of peace, but now degraded to a den of beasts--over it shone of a sudden
the new wan crescent moon! I turned me round, I turned and fell to
weeping in my hands!

This abject surrender of mine patently more astounded the company than
had the accident to MacLachlan. M'Iver stood dumfounded, to behold a
cavalier of fortune's tears, and MacLachlan's face, for all his pain,
gave up its hate and anger for surprise, as he looked at me over the
shoulder of his kneeling clansman plying rude leech-craft on his wound.

"Are you vexed?" said he, with short breaths.

"And that bitterly!" I answered.

"Oh, there is nothing to grieve on," said he, mistaking me most
lamentably. "I'll give you your chance again. I owe you no less; but my
knife, if you'll believe me, sprang out of itself, and I struck at you
in a ruddy mist of the senses."

"I seek no other chance," I said; "our feuds are over: you were egged on
by a subterfuge, deceit has met deceit, and the balance is equal."

His mood softened, and we helped him to his feet, M'Iver a silent man
because he failed to comprehend this turn of affairs. We took him to a
cothouse down at the foot of the wood, where he lay while a boy was sent
for a skilly woman.

In life, as often as in the stories of man's in