"Let me see," said I; "when I went abroad, were not you and one of the Glenaora Campbells chief?"
I said it as if the recollection had but sprung to me, while the truth is I had thought on it often in camp and field, with a regret that the girl should throw herself off on so poor a partner.
She laughed merrily with her whole soul in the business, and her face without art or pretence--a fashion most wholesome to behold.
"He married some one nearer him in years long syne," said she. "You forget I was but a bairn when we romped in the hay-dash." And we buckled to the crack again, I more keen on it than ever. She was a most marvellous fine girl, and I thought her (well I mind me now) like the blue harebell that nods upon our heather hills.
We might, for all I dreamt of the widow's brandy, have been conversing on the stair-head yet, and my story had a different conclusion, had not a step sounded on the stair, and up banged John Splendid, his sword-scabbard clinking against the wall of the stair with the haste of him.
"Set a cavalier at the side of an anker of brandy," he cried, "an----"
Then he saw he was in company. He took off his bonnet with a sweep I'll warrant he never learned anywhere out of France, and plunged into the thick of our discourse with a query.
"At your service, Mistress Brown," said he. "Half my errand to town to-day was to find if young MacLach-lan, your relative, is to be at the market here to-morrow. If so----"
"Will he be intending to put up here all night, then?"
"He comes to supper at least," said she, "and his biding overnight is yet to be settled."
John Splendid toyed with the switch in his hand in seeming abstraction, and yet as who was pondering on how to put an unwelcome message in plausible language.
"Do you know," said he at last to the girl, in a low voice, for fear his words should reach the ears of her mother in-bye, "I would as well see MacLachlan out of town the morn's night. There's a waft of cold airs about this place not particularly wholesome for any of his clan or name. So much I would hardly care to say to himself; but he might take it from you, madam, that the other side of the loch is the safest place for sound sleep for some time to come."