“He ga'ed awa'—” began the little man, with the whisper of the conspirator.
“Mungo!” she cried, “you will not say a word of it. It is all bye with me, and what for not with you? I command you to say no more about it, do you hear?” And her foot beat with an imperiousness almost comical from one with such a broken countenance.
“It's a gey droll thing—”
“It's a gey hard thing, that is what it is,” she interrupted him, “that you will not do what I tell you, and say nothing of what I have no relish to hear, and must have black shame to think of. Must I go over all that I have said to you already? It is finished, Mungo; are you listening? Did he—did he—looked vexed? But it does not matter, it is finished, and I have been a very foolish girl.”
“But that needna' prevent me tellin' ye that the puir man's awa' clean gyte.”
She smiled just the ghost of a smile at that, then put her hands upon her ears.
“Oh!” she cried despairingly, “have I not a friend left?”
Mungo sighed and said no more then, but went to Annapla and sought relief for his feelings in bilingual wrangling with that dark abigail. At low tide beggars from Glen Croe came to his door with yawning pokes and all their old effrontery: he astounded them by the fiercest of receptions, condemned them all eternally for limmers and sorners, lusty rogues and vagabonds.
“Awa'! awa'!” he cried, an implacable face against their whining protestations—“Awa', or I'll gie ye the gairde! If I was my uncle Erchie, I wad pit an end to your argy-bargying wi' hail frae a gun!” But to Annapla it was, “Puir deevils, it's gey hard to gie them the back o' the haun' and them sae used to rougher times in Doom. What'll they think o' us? It's sic a doon-come, but we maun be hainin' seein' Leevie's lost her jo, and no ither way clear oot o' the bit. I'm seein' a toom girnel and done beef here lang afore next Martinmas.”
These plaints were to a woman blissfully beyond comprehending the full import of them, for so much was Annapla taken up with her Gift, so misty and remote the realms of Gaelic dream wherein she moved, that the little Lowland oddity's perturbation was beneath her serious attention.