She cried out at a sudden tug on her pigtail, and looked up, with tears in her eyes, to meet her father's scowl.
"You eediot!" said Gourlay, gazing at his son with a savage contempt, "have you no pride to let Wilson's son be your master?"
John slunk from the room.
"Bide where you are, Templandmuir," said Gourlay after a little. "I'll be back directly."
He went through to the kitchen and took a crystal jug from the dresser. He "made a point" of bringing the water for his whisky. "I like to pump it up cold," he used to say, "cold and cold, ye know, till there's a mist on the outside of the glass like the bloom on a plum, and then, by Goad, ye have the fine drinking! Oh no—ye needn't tell me, I wouldn't lip drink if the water wasna ice-cold." He never varied from the tipple he approved. In his long sederunts with Templandmuir he would slip out to the pump, before every brew, to get water of sufficient coldness.
To-night he would birl the bottle with Templandmuir as usual, till the fuddled laird should think himself a fine big fellow as being the intimate of John Gourlay—and then, sober as a judge himself, he would drive him home in the small hours. And when next they met, the pot-valiant squireen would chuckle proudly, "Faith, yon was a night." By a crude cunning of the kind Gourlay had maintained his ascendancy for years, and to-night he would maintain it still. He went out to the pump to fetch water with his own hands for their first libation.
But when he came back and set out the big decanter Templandmuir started to his feet.
"Noat to-night, Mr. Gourlay," he stammered—and his unusual flutter of refusal might have warned Gourlay—"noat to-night, if you please; noat to-night, if you please. As a matter of fact—eh—what I really came into the town for, doan't you see, was—eh—to attend the meeting the Provost has convened about the railway. You'll come down to the meeting, will ye noat?"
He wanted to get Gourlay away from the House with the Green Shutters. It would be easier to quarrel with him out of doors.
But Gourlay gaped at him across the table, his eyes big with surprise and disapproval.