"He is a McTavish," admitted Mr. Traquair; "so much I knew before he told me his name."
"He has in his pocket the bit shirt that wee Colland wore when the gypsies snitched him and carried him over seas; it's all of a piece with many another garment of wee Colland's. I've had out the trunk in which his little duds have been stored these many years. The man is Colland's great-grandson. I look at him, and I admit it without proof."
"My dear," said Mr. Traquair, "you have no comprehension of the law. I will fight this claim through every court of the land, or I'm ready to meet him on Bannockburn field, my ancestral claymore against his. A rare laugh we'll have when the pretender produces his bit shirtie in the court, and says, 'Look, your honor, upon my patent o' nobilitee.'"
"Mind this," said The McTavish, "I'll make no contests, nor have none made. Only," she smiled faintly, "I hay'na told him who he rightly is. He claims cousinship. But it has not dawned on him that Colland was to have been The McTavish, that he is The McTavish, that I am merely Miss Ellen Alice Douglas Cameron Dundee Campbell McGregor Breadalbane Blair McTavish, houseless, homeless spinster, wi' but a drap o' gude blood to her heritage. I have not told him, Mr. Traquair. He does not know. What's to be done? What would you do—if you knew that he was he, and that you were only you?"
"It's your meeserable conscience of a Church-going Scot," commiserated
Traquair, not without indignation. "What would a Campbell have done?
He'd have had himself made a judge in the land, and he'd have condemned
the pretender to the gallows—out of hand, my dear—out of hand!"
She shook her head at him as at a naughty child. "Where is your own meeserable conscience, Traquair?"
"My dear," cried the little man, "it is storming my reason."
"There," said she, "I told you so. And now we are both of one mind, you shall present these tidings to McTavish together with my compliments."
"First," said Traquair cautiously, "I'll bide a bit on the thought."
"I will leave the time to your meeserable conscience," said Miss McTavish generously. "Meanwhile, my dear man, while the semblance of prosperity abides over my head in the shape of a roof, there's a matter o' ten pound—"