He gazed at me, as if he did not see what kind of animal was making the noise like talking. I am sure that for the time he knew me not from John Knox.
"What did she mean?" I asked him.
"Mean!" said he, "mean——" speaking vaguely as one in a swither.
"You are heady and moidered with not getting a kiss from a lass," said I, with, I grant, some little spite.
"Did she ever kiss you?" cried he, looking truculently at me.
"Nay!" said I bluntly, for indeed the thing was not in my thought.
"Then you ken naught about it. You had better hold your wheesht!"
He stood so long thinking, sometimes giving his thigh a little slap, like one that has suddenly remembered something pleasant which he had forgotten, that I was near coming away in disgust and leaving the fool, when I remembered that I knew not where to go.
In a while he came to himself somewhat, and I told him what Kate McGhie had said to me over her shoulder.
"Did Kate say that?" he cried. "She could surely not have said all that and I not hear her."