"It's fine," said David, cautiously.
"I'm sure it is," cried Phyllis, with honest warmth. "My dearest friends are Scotch and English—in Scott and Thackeray, and our beloved books, you know. Are you a true Scot, and think Burns the greatest of poets?"
"Burns is a great poet," said David, cannily.
"If you are a Campbell I suppose you would throw me overboard if I quoted 'The Bonnie House o' Airlie,' would you?" asked Phyllis.
"The uprooted spray of heather," as Alan called him, looked surprised and pleased; he even ventured into a question on his own part. "How comes it you have heard that tale over here?" he asked; only he pronounced "heard" as if it were "hard," as indeed it was to his companion.
"Oh, that's owing to Barrie," she said. "I might never have paid any attention to the note to the ballad in my 'Border Ballads,' but I laughed till I cried at the story of the piper who went piping out of town in a fury because he was a Campbell and some one had sung 'The Bonnie House o' Airlie' in his presence. Do you remember, in the 'Little Minister'?"
"Aye, Barrie is humorous," assented David, with an expression so at variance with the word that Phyllis had to turn her head away to keep from laughing. Fearing he had seen her amusement, she hastily asked: "Would you like to be a writer? They say all Scotch—or Scotsmen, as you would say—love learning. What are you to be?"
"A merchant. My father sent me over here to get into a New York firm; I hate it," said David. "I was to have gone into the army."
"And have you given it up?" asked Phyllis, absent-mindedly, and could have bitten her tongue out the moment she had spoken, remembering his misfortune.
"Can a cripple enter the army?" demanded David, a dark-red color rushing up under the freckles his recent sea-voyage had deposited on his handsome face.