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The lads in the byre shook tartan and out to the fresh air, and rejoiced in the wind with deep-drawn gulping breaths, as if they might wash the smallest dust of disease from their bodily systems. So at last only M'Iver and I were left standing at the door. "Well," said John, with an effort, "we must be going. I never thought it was so late.
"Housewife," said John M'Iver, blandly, "we're a bit off our way here by no fault of our own, and we have been on the hillside all night, and " "Come in," she said, shortly, still scrutinising us very closely, till I felt myself flushing wildly. She gave us the only two stools in her dwelling, and broke the peats that smouldered on the middle of her floor.
M'Iver struck on a more pleasing and cleanly plan. It was to give the MacDonalds tit for tat, and decoy them into the house as their friends had decoyed us into it, and leave them there in durance while we went on our own ways.
I fumed and sweat, speechless at the injustice of it, while the girl held herself more aloof than ever, busy preparing for our evening meal. But I had no time to put myself right in her estimate of me before M'Iver came back from his airing with an alarming story. "It's time we were taking our feet from here," he cried, running up to us.
In an hour or more after I lay down M'Iver alarmed the advance-guard of my coming sleep by his unconscious whistle of a pibroch, and I sat up to find that the cleric was sharing my waukrife rest He had cast his peruke.
To all this I listened soberly, at the time comprehending that this was a gentleman suffering from the disease of being unable to make up his mind. I would have let him go on in that key while he pleasured it, for it's a vein there's no remedy for at the time being; but M'Iver was not of such tolerant stuff as I. He sat with an amazed face till his passion simmered over into a torrent of words.
I was starting on the way to Inverlochy when M'Iver protested we must certainly go a bit of the way to Kilcumin. "I'm far from sure," said he, "that that very particular bit of MacDonald woman is quite confident of the truth of my story. At any rate, she's no woman if she's not turning it over in her mind by now, and she'll be out to look the road we take before very long or I'm mistaken."
M'Iver soothed her with great skill, and brought her back to her bairns. "Ay," said he, "some day they'll be off your hands, and you the lady with sons and servants." "Had you a wife and bairns of your own," said the woman, "you might learn some day that a parent's happiest time is when her children are young.
M'Iver was just, perhaps, carrying his humour at my cost a little too far for my temper, which was never readily stirred, but flamed fast enough when set properly alowe, and Betty here too your true woman wit saw it sooner than he did himself, quick enough in the uptake though he was.
There may be some unco quirks to be performed, and some sore hearts to confer at the doing of them, but Heaven itself, for all its puissance, must shorten the pigeon's wing that the gled of the wood may have food to live on." "Upon my word, M'Iver," said Argile, "you beat me at my own trade of debate, and have you ever heard of a fellow Machiavelli?"
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