"Oh, Hamish, Hamish," said she, "I will have been doing that this while."
CHAPTER XX.
"THE LOVE SECRET."
Lassies are droll creatures, and will tell many things the one to the other in the way of a ploy, and Margaret McBride made great work with old Betty's love potion, and that to Helen alone.
"I will be trying it on Hugh," said she, "when I have you sleeping, for
I will get scraping the white of your nail then."
And now this is the droll thing that came about. We had a day after the otters at the Bennan, a wet cold day, with little that was laughable in it, except that a man of the Macdonalds took an otter home over his shoulders, and the beast dead, as we thought; but coming in at his own door it gripped him by the back of his hip, and at the start he got he let a great cry to his wife in the Gaelic.
"Fell the beast, fell the beast," and the wife, with a beetle in her hand, and in a flurry of excitement to be felling the beast, came a dour on her man's head that felled him, poor man, and we left them then, the otter killed at last, and the man and wife demented with the suddenness of the happenings, and came to the house of Scaurdale.
Now the lassies, Margaret and Helen, were in the mood for a ploy, and Margaret it was who scraped the little white powder from Helen's polished nail. "A wee tashte," she laughed, "old Betty would be saying, 'chust a wee tashte.'" And when the boys came in red-faced and with sparkling eyes (for I was watching the prank), "Now," said Margaret, "I will be giving poor Hugh his dram, and then everything will do finely."
"But," said Helen, "I will be my own cup-bearer, or maybe the charm will be a useless thing." And she took the old glass—a rummer it was—and she carried it very daintily to the boys and bowed.
"Here is refreshment, my tired hunter," said she, and gave the glass into Bryde's hand, and that swarthy hillman raised the glass to the cup-bearer and drained it.