“Are you keeping the place on?” I asked the widow, “or do you go back to your folks, for I notice from your tongue that you are of the North?”
“I’m of the Grants,” she said; “but my heart’s in Glencoe, and I’ll never leave it I am not grieving at the future, I am but minding on the past, and I have my bairns.... More milk for the lads outside; stretch your hands.... Oh yes, I have my bairns.”
“Long may they prosper, mistress,” said M’Iver, drumming with a horn spoon on his knee, and winking and smiling very friendly to the little fellows in a row in the bed, who, all but the oldest, thawed to this humour of the stranger. “It must be a task getting a throng like yon bedded at evening. Some day they’ll be off your hand, and it’ll be no more the lullaby of Crodh Chailein, but them driving at the beasts for themselves.”
“Are you married?” asked the woman.
“No,” said John, with a low laugh, “not yet. I never had the fortune to fill the right woman’s eye. I’ve waited at the ferry for some one who’ll take a man over without the ferry fee, for I’m a poor gentleman though I’m of a good family, and had plenty, and the ones with the tocher won’t have me, and the tocherless girls I dare not betray.”
“You ken the old word,” said the woman; “the man who waits long at the ferry will get over some day.”
Stewart put down a cogie and loosened a button of his vest, and with an air of great joviality, that was marred curiously by the odd look his absence of lugs conferred, he winked cunningly at us and slapped the woman in a rough friendship on the shoulder.
“Are you thinking yourself——” he began, and what he would finish with may be easily guessed. But M’Iver fixed him with an eye that pricked like a rapier.
“Sit ye down, Stewart,” said he; “your race is royal, as ye must be aye telling us, but there’s surely many a droll bye-blow in the breed.”
“Are you not all from Appin?” asked the woman, with a new interest, taking a corner of M’Iver’s plaiding in her hand and running a few checks through fine delicate fingers of a lady. Her face dyed crimson; she drew back her stool a little, and cried out—