“Answer me, ye auld jade, be ye ashamed of me?”
“Hush, Meg. Don’t fall into that ballad-singing habit of yours. I can stand anything but that.”
“You stand! What have you to stand compared to me? It was not always so. I was fair to see in the old days long gone by. Was I not a bonny lass then, Kilian?”
“Ay, you were so, Meg; but that is long gone by.”
The old woman moaned. She had regular features and may have been a beauty once; but, as the patroon said, it was long ago. How wistfully she must have looked back upon what would never come again. There was a pause, and Meg was the first to break it.
“What did you come for?”
“To see how you were; to see what I could do for you.”
The last word seemed to rouse her evil demon. She sat bolt up in bed and clasped her hands tight together; then she doubled her fists and shook them in his face like a mad woman.
“To do what you can for me, you brat of hell. Have you not had half a life for that? What have you done for me? You have kept me, you would say. Ay, you have kept me like the old toothless bitch I am. But you did not keep me where I should have been. And I could have hanged you any time these twenty years. But I loved you. My God, what will not a woman do for the man she loves!”
Meg fell back upon the pillow in exhaustion.