"Ye need go no further," Sandy broke in, with a laugh. "You flatter yourself! You think," he continued; "you've been incapable of thought for nearly two weeks. Neither of us would give a boddle for your opinion on any subject save one. I'll wager," he said, coming over to his son and putting a hand on each of his shoulders, "that ye could not count twenty straight ahead, if your salvation depended on it. And to think that I have been raising a great fellow like you to be ordered about by a slip of a girl. Ye're crazy," he said, going on, "stark, Bedlam crazy!"
On the moment of his speaking Nancy came to the door with mutinous eyes, a riot of color in her cheeks, and some filmy white stuff drawn round her head and shoulders, and as she stood Danvers turned to us.
"Look at her!" he cried. "How else would ye have me be?"
We were out of doors one afternoon, perhaps a week later, sitting in the shadow of the great tower. Nancy, in a frock of green, cut out at the neck, and a bewildering big hat with pink flowers upon it, was pouring tea for us, with Danvers Carmichael lying at full length on the grass beside her, smoking and inventing excuses at intervals to touch her hand.
The talk drifted round to Robert Burns, and when I stated the manner in which Nancy and I had spent the first night we had had his book, Danvers regarded us with no small degree of amazement.
"Did you," he inquired, after a pause, "sit up all night reading rhyme, the two of you?"
"We did," said I; "and it's not the first night we have passed so, Nancy Stair and I."
"But why," he went on, "couldn't you wait till the morning?"
"We're no made that way," I answered, with a laugh.
"Well," he returned, "the thing is as incomprehensible to me as if you'd tattooed yourself; but," he added philosophically, clasping his hands behind his head and staring up into the sky, "every man knows his own fun. There's a friend of mine who knows this Burns," he added.