"I shall be very pleased to receive your message, Mr. Burnet, and to deliver it to David when opportunity offers."
"Well, it is just this, that if he will accept the king's generous indulgence and return to the manse of Broomhill, she will come back to him with her children, thus showing herself willing to overlook his long desertion."
Jane Gray drew herself up, and a slight colour rose in her cheek.
"Truly, Mr. Burnet, I think Lilian Gray cannot be a changed woman when she sent such a message to my brother," she said, proudly. "She should rather have couched her message in terms of humility, seeing she so wrongly and unkindly quitted him in the hour of his need."
"That is your way of looking at it. We hold that, by his folly, David Gray forfeited all claim on his wife's consideration," retorted Haughhead, angrily. "But it is no use arguing with a Gray, so I will be off, Jane Gray, wishing you a very good day."
"Stay, Mr. Burnet; will you tell me, please, how it is with the little ones, my brother's bairns?" said Jane, laying a pleading hand on his bridle rein. "I have a great yearning to see or hear something of them."
"Oh, they are well, and as bonnie bairns as eyes could wish to see--true Burnets both of them," answered Haughhead, stretching a point just to vex the heart of the woman before him. "Tell David that, and tell him that they'll soon forget they have a father at all."
With which parting shot, which brought an unbidden tear to Jane Gray's eye, the Laird of Haughhead gave his horse the rein and rode rapidly away.
CHAPTER XIX.
UNLOOKED-FOR NEWS.