'She was proposing so,' said he, as calmly as when he had walked across the yard to the summer-house, with the hackbutt bullets splattering about him and the guns going crack-crack down the hedgerows, like the thumbs of a class of bairns when the dominie asks a question.
'So,' said I. 'And you were thinking, maybe, that that was the action of a friend when your comrade was laid by the heels?'
'I was thinking so,' said he, looking out of the window at the trees.
'Did you not know,' I cried, for I was angered beyond words, being weak, and taking ill with the cherry being thus snatched out of my mouth, 'did you not know that Kate Allison was my lass before she was yours? Did she not tell you that?' said I.
Now, had I been myself, I should not thus have told left-handed tales on a lass, even though I believed with some reason that she had deceived me.
'I was not deprived of the sight of my eyes,' said he, very quietly.
'And you mean by that—?' said I, trembling with anger.
'That I did not need telling that you had been courting the lass off and on for a year or twa, and that she took it not ill.'
'And, in spite of that, you made up to Kate Allison when I was lying sick unto death upon my bed?' I asked him bitterly.
'How long may you have kenned Kate Allison?' said Robert Harburgh to me in his turn.