“Whereat they glanced cunningly at one another, hearing the thick stammer in my father’s voice.
“‘And good e’en to you, Earlstoun!’ they answered, taking off their hats to him.
“The courtesy touched my father. It seemed that they wished to be friends, and nothing touches a big careless gentleman like Alexander Gordon more than the thought that others desire to make up a quarrel and he will not.
“So with that he cried, ‘Let us bury bygones and be friends.’
“‘Agreed,’ answered Boyd, waving his hand jovially; let us go to the change-house and toast the reconciliation in a tass of brandy,’
“This he said knowing that my father was on his way from market.”
“For this,” said I, not thinking of my place and dignity, “will I reckon with William Boyd.”
Mary Gordon went on without noticing my interruption.
“So though my father told them that he could not go, that his wife waited for him by the croft entrance and that his daughter was coming down the water-side to meet him, yet upon their crying out that he must not be hen-pecked in the matter of the drowning of an ancient enmity, my father consented to go with them.”
Mary Gordon looked before her a long time without speaking, as though little liking to tell what followed. “They knew,” she said, “that he was to preside that night at a meeting of the eldership and commissioners of the Hill-folk. So they brought him as in the change-house they had made him to the meeting.”