“Have any of you paid the King’s cess,[5] or had any dealings with the malignants?” she said, speaking to us as to children taken in a fault.
“Not save along the barrel of a musket, my lady of Earlstoun!” quoth my father, drily.
The stern-visaged woman smiled at the ready answer.
“E’en stick to that, goodman of Ardarroch—it is the safest commerce with such ill-favoured cattle!” she said.
And with that she stepped further on to interrogate some newcomers who had arrived after us in the yard of the farm.
But indeed I minded her nothing. For there was a sweeter and fairer thing to see standing by the cheek of the door—even young Mary Gordon, the very maid I had once carried so far in my arms, now grown a great lass and a tall, albeit still slender as a year-old wand of willow by the water’s edges. Her hair, which had been lint white when I brought her down the side of Bennan after the shooting of the poor lad, was now darkening into a golden brown, with thick streaks of a warmer hue, ruddy as copper, running through it.
This girl leaned against the doorstep, her shapely head inclined a little sideways, and her profile clear and cold as the graving on a seal ring, turned away from me.
For my life I could not take my eyes off her.
“I, even I, Quintin MacClellan, have carried that girl in my arms and thought nothing of it!” I said the words over and over to myself, and somehow they were exceedingly pleasing to me.
I had ever sneered at love and love-making before, but (I own it) after seeing that fair young lass stand by the low entering in of the farmhouse door, I scoffed no more.