r quarters. What do you say to that, Barbreck?" she added,
laughing slyly to my friend.

A great ease came upon my mind; it was lightened of a load that had lain
on it since ever my Tynree spaewife found, or pretended to find, in
my silvered loof such an unhappy portent of my future. And then this
rapture was followed by a gladness no less profound that Mac-Lachlan,
bad as he had been, was not the villain quite I had fancied: if he had
bragged of conquests, it had been with truth though not with decency.

Inneraora, as we returned to it that night, was a town enchanted; again
its lights shone warm and happily. I lingered late in its street, white
in the light of the stars, and looked upon the nine windows of Askaig's
house. There was no light in all the place; the lower windows of the
tenement were shuttered, and slumber was within. It gave me an agreeable
exercise to guess which of the unshuttered nine would let in the first
of the morning light on a pillow with dark hair tossed upon it and a
rounded cheek upon a hand like milk.

CHAPTER XXXIV.--LOVE IN THE WOODS.

Young Lachie did not bide long on our side of the water: a day or two
and he was away back to his people, but not before he and I, in a way,
patched up once more a friendship that had never been otherwise than
distant, and was destined so to remain till the end, when he married my
aunt, Nannie Ruadh of the Boshang Gate, whose money we had been led to
look for as a help to our fallen fortunes. She might, for age, have been
his mother, and she was more than a mother to the child he brought to
her from Carlunnan without so much as by your leave, the day after they
took up house together. "That's my son," said he, "young Lachie." She
looked at the sturdy little fellow beating with a knife upon the bark
of an ashen sapling he was fashioning into a whistle, and there was no
denying the resemblance. The accident was common enough in those days.
"Who is the mother?" was all she said, with her plump hand on the little
fellow's head. "She was So-and-so," answered her husband, looking into
the fire; "we were very young, and I've paid the penalty by my rueing it
ever since."

Nannie Ruadh took the child to her heart that never knew the glamour of
her own, and he grew up, as I could tell in a more interesting tale than
this, to be a great and good soldier, who won battles for his country.
So it will be seen that the Dame Dubh's story to us in the cot by Aora
h