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"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.
I had made up my mind for the twentieth time to go the length of Carlunnan and face her plump and plain, when behold she came suddenly round the corner at the Maltland where the surviving Lowland troops were gathered! M'Iver was with her, and my resolution shrivelled and shook within me like an old nut kernel.
M'I ver turned round and looked her, with cunning humour, in the face. "I might well guess that," he said; "you have the best name in the countryside for these offices, that many a fumbling dame botches. I suppose," he added, when the pleasure in her face showed his words had found her vanity "I suppose you mean the bairn up in Carlunnan?"
It is likely, too, I had been down leaving M'Iver out of consideration altogether had there not been the tales about MacLachlan, tales that came to my ears in the most miraculous way, with no ill intention on the part of the gossips about his constant haunting of Inneraora and the company of his cousin. He had been seen there with her on the road to Carlunnan. That venue of all others!
"MacLachlan himself never thought I was in the woman's confidence, and I've seen him in Carlunnan there since I came home, pretending more than a cousin's regard for the Provost's daughter so that he might share in the bairn's fondling. He did it so well, too, that the lady herself would talk of its fatherless state with tears in her eyes."
"And you must be going," he said; "I wish you could have waited to see Betty, who's on a visit to Carlunnan and should be home by now." As he said it, he was tapping his snuff-mull and looking at me pawkily out of the corners of his eyes, that hovered between me and his wife, who stood with the wool in her hand, beaming mildly up in my face.
She had been visiting the child at Carlunnan, where it had been adopted by her kinswoman, who made a better guardian than its grandmother, who died on her way to Dunbarton. "What sets you on this road?" she asked blandly. "Oh, you have often seen me on this road before," I said, boldly and with meaning.
Her news, so cunningly squeezed from her by John Splendid, relieved me at once of the dread that MacLachlan, by his opportunities of wooing, had made himself secure in her affections, and that those rambles by the river to Carlunnan had been by the tryst of lovers.
"Let us stand here," said he, "and I'll swear I'm not very well acquainted with our friend's habits if he's not passing this way to Carlunnan sometime in the next ten minutes, for I saw Mistress Betty going up there, as I said, not so very long ago." This hint at MacLachlan's persistency exasperated me the more.
It was ever "the dear child," the "m'eudailgheal" "the white treasure," "the orphan "; it was always an accent of the most fond and lingering character. I paid no great heed to this constant wail; but M'Iver pondered and studied, repeating at last the words to himself as MacLachlan uttered them. "If that's not the young one in Carlunnan he harps on," he concluded at last, "I'm mistaken.
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