ead you into."

He broke out suddenly.

"Be honest, Duncan," he said, "if you must boast! If you are bound to
lie, let it not be to me. You would not have it otherwise. You would not
be as I am, not for all the gold of earth. No"--he held his breath a
long while--"no, and I, if I had the choice, would I not give all that I
have, or am ever likely to have, for--but no, I'm a silent Scot, and I
canna speak the word----"

"I'm the other sort of Scot," I cried, "and I'll speak it for you. Man,
it's the first decent human thing I have ever heard come out o' your
mouth. You would give all for LOVE!"

"Oh, man," he cried, snatching his fingers to his ears as if I
blasphemed, "are ye not feared?"

"No, I'm not," I declared, truly enough; "what for should I be feared?
Of a lassie? Tell a lassie--that ye--that ye----"

"No, no," cried Fred Esquillant, "not again!"

"Well, then, that ye 'like' her--we will let it go at that. She will
want ye to say the other, but at least that will do to begin on. And
come, tell me now, what's to hinder ye, Fred?"

"Oh, everything," he said; "it's just fair shameless the way folk can
bring themselves to speak openly of suchlike things!"

"And where would you have been, my lad, if once on a day your faither
had not telled your mither that she was bonny?"

"I don't know, and as little do I care," he cried.

"Well, then," said I, "there's Amaryllis--what about her?"

"That's Latin," said Fred, waving his arm.

"And there's Ruth, and the lass in the Song of Solomon!"

"That's in the Bible," he murmured, as if he thought no better of the
Sacred Word for giving a place to such frivolities.

"Fred," I said, "tell me what you would be at? Would you have all women
slain like the babes of Bethlehem, or must we have you made into a monk
and locked in a cell with only a book and an inkhorn and a quill?"

"Neither," he said; "but--oh, man, there is something awesome,
coarse-grained and common in the way the like o' you speak about women."

"Aye, do ye tell me that?" I said to try him; "coarse, maybe, as our
father Adam, when he tilled his garden, and common as the poor humanity
that is yet of his flesh and blood."

"There ye go!" he cried; "I knew well that my words were thrown away."

"Speak up, Mr. Lily Fingers," I answered; "let _us_ hear what sort of a
world you would have without love--and men and women to make it."

"It would be like that in which dwell the angels of heaven--where