"Another bottle of wine," he cried, with a heady kind of half-boyish defiance.
"But you have not yet finished this," she answered. "Nor, indeed," she added, with a roguish smile, "even paid for it."
Wat threw a pair of gold pieces on the table.
"One for the wine and one to buy you a new pair of buckled shoes, Little Marie," he said.
"Then for luck you must drink out of the one I wear," she said, and forthwith she poured a thimbleful of the wine into the shoe, which she deftly slipped from the foot which had swung by his ribbon-knot of blue-and-white.
"Pledge me!" she cried, daring him to a match of folly, and she held the curious beaker close to his chin. Wat was conscious that his cousin stood grave and stern by the door, and that on Barra's face there hovered a strangely satisfied smile. But something angry and hot within him drove him recklessly deeper and deeper. He had no pleasure in the thing. It was as apples of Sodom in his mouth, exceeding bitter fruit; but at least he knew that he was cutting every tie that bound him to the street of Zaandpoort—to those who had despised and rejected him.
He lifted the shoe of the Little Marie in the air.
"To the owner of the prettiest foot in the world!" he cried, and pledged her.
Four men who had come in after my Lord of Barra now sat themselves down at the table nearest to Wat. The Little Marie, having recovered her slipper and wiped it coquettishly with the tassels of Wat's sash, somewhat reluctantly went away to bring the second bottle of Rhenish.
During her absence Lochinvar remained behind, blowing with all his might upon the dying coals of his anger, and telling himself that he had done nothing worthy of reproach, when suddenly John Scarlett plumped himself down into the chair opposite him. He had been in the inn all the time, but only now he had come near Walter Gordon.