"I think," Danvers answered, "you'll find me asking only what most men expect to get."
"If that be true, the chances are heavy that I shall live and die unwed," she said with a laugh.
"Oh, no!" he cried, in a cutting voice. "I dare say your mind's made up as to what you intend to do! Perhaps when you're the Duchess of Borthwicke his grace will enjoy your visiting other men and writing lines like these," and he dashed his fist on the paper again.
Nancy had by this time come to the far end of her patience, and she was on her feet in a minute.
"Listen to me," she said. "I went to Ayrshire at the written asking of Janet McGillavorich to come to her own home. The morning I started for Mauchline the rear of her house fell into the cellar, making it extremely dangerous to remain in any part of the dwelling. I went to the inn only because she was there, and she stayed with me until my father came and took me away. I saw Robert Burns alone but once, entirely by accident, in the broad light of day.
"As for the rhyme," and she looked down at the paper for a moment, regarding it as a thing of no importance whatever, "it was not I who spoke in the lines, but a gipsy girl of my imaginings. Ye've had little personal experience with the thing called gift——"
He must have thought there was some flouting of him in this, for he broke in heatedly:
"And I thank God for it," he cried, "for it seems to be a thing which makes people betray trusts, lose all thought for others, raise hopes which they never intend to fulfil, unbridle their passions, forget their sex, and ride away to the deil at their own gate."
None could have foreseen the effect this speech had upon Nancy; the thought it contained falling so parallel to her own talk of the night before; but it's one matter to say a thing of one's self and an entirely different affair to have it said concerning one, and in a minute her anger fairly matched his own.
"Ye've insulted me, Danvers," she said, "many times in this talk, both in word and look; insulted me in my father's house, where you've been welcome, boy and man, ever since ye were born; insulted me, too, in a way I'm not like to forget."