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"It is no win," said Aleck, hotly. "No, no, lads," said Macdonald Bhain, before Farquhar could reply. "It is as even a match as could well be. It is fine teams you both have got, and you have handled them well." But all the same, Ranald's friends were wildly enthusiastic over what they called his victory, and Don could hardly keep his hands off him, for very joy.
"I have heard so much about you, and I am going to call you Ranald, as they all do." "How lovely!" sighed De Lacy. Her greeting warmed Ranald's heart that somehow had been chilled in the meeting. Something was wrong. Was it this fop of a soldier, or had Maimie changed? Ranald glanced at her face. No, she was the same, only more beautiful than he had dreamed.
Slight as it was, Ranald noticed the smile, and turning from her abruptly to Mrs. Murray, said: "We were thinking that Friday would be a good day for the sugaring-off, if that will do you." "Quite well, Ranald," said the minister's wife; "and it is very good of you to have us." She, too, had noted Maimie's smile, and seeing the dark flush on Ranald's cheek, she knew well what it meant.
Unfortunately for him, Ranald's face was so turned that he could not see it, and so he had no hint of the wrath that was steadily boiling up to the point of overflow. They were nearing the close of the last verse of the psalm, when Hughie, whose eyes never wandered long from Ranald's direction, uttered a sharp "Oh, my!"
The lieutenant's second hundred with a part of Harry's and Mr. Sims's passed into Ranald's possession. Again De Lacy challenged to play. "No," said Ranald, "I have done." He put back into his linen bag his one hundred dollars, counted out two hundred, and gave it to LeNoir, saying: "That is Rouleau's," and threw the rest upon the table. "I want no man's money," he said, "that I do not earn."
The pony regarded them with indifference, but the colt shied and plunged. "Whoa, Liz!" Liz was Ranald's contraction for Lizette, the name of the French horse-trainer and breeder, Jules La Rocque, gave to her mother, who in her day was queen of the ice at L'Original Christmas races. "Be quate, Nigger, will you!"
Some day, when his fingers would be feeling for LeNoir's throat, he would drink long and fully that sweet draught of vengeance. He knew, too, that it added to the bitterness in his father's heart to know that, in the spring's work that every warm day was bringing nearer, he could take no part; and that was partly the cause of Ranald's gloom.
Murdie had interfered on Ranald's behalf, chiefly because he was Don's friend, but also because he was unwilling that Ranald should be involved in a quarrel with the McRaes, which he knew would be a serious affair for him. But now his strongest reason for desiring peace was that he had pledged himself to the minister's wife to bring it about in some way or other.
Some of Ranald's foot-ball friends, Little Merrill, Starry Hamilton, that's the captain, you know, and myself among them, were asked to a farewell supper by this young lady, and when the men had well drunk fed, I mean and were properly dissolved in tears over the prospect of Ranald's departure, at a critical moment the Institute was introduced as a side issue. It was dear to Ranald's heart.
The simple beauty of the words, the music in the voice, and the tender, trustful feeling that breathed through the prayer awakened in Ranald's heart emotions and longings he had never known before, and he rose from his knees feeling how wicked and how cruel a thing it would be to cause one of these little ones to stumble.
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