“Nae doobt! nae doobt!—But there’s ae thing waur.”
“What is that?”
“To come upon a mither ’at——”
He stopped abruptly; his eyes went wandering about the room, and the muscles of his face worked convulsively.
Florimel saw that she had been driving against a stone wall. She paused a moment, and then resumed.
“Anyhow, if she is your mother,” she said, “nothing you can do will alter it.”
“She maun pruv’ ’t,” was all Malcolm’s dogged reply.
“Just so; and if she can’t,” said Florimel, “you’ll be no worse than you were before—and no better,” she added with a sigh.
Malcolm lifted his questioning to her searching eyes.
“Don’t you see,” she went on, very softly, and lowering her look, from the half-conscious shame of half-unconscious falseness, “I can’t be all my life here at Lossie? We shall have to say good-bye to each other—never to meet again most likely. But if you should turn out to be of good family, you know,—”