"Sir," he said grimly, "I do not bandy words with a stranger upon the public highway. I myself have nothing to say to you. I forbid you ever again to speak to my daughter. Elspeth, follow me!"
And with no more than this he turned and stalked away. But his daughter also had the high Highland blood in her veins. She shook off with one large motion of her arm the stringy clutch of her aunt's fingers.
"Heed you not, Allan," she said, speaking very clearly, so that all might hear, "when ye want her, Elspeth Stuart will come the long road and the straight road to speak a word with you."
It was a bold avowal to make, and a moment before the girl had not meant to say anything of the kind. But they had taken the wrong way with her.
"Oh, unmaidenly—most unmaidenly!" cried her aunt, "come away—ye are mad this day, Elspeth Stuart—he has but a hunder a year of stipend, and may lose that ony day!"
But Elspeth did not answer. She was holding out her hand to Allan Syme. He bent quickly and kissed it. This young man had had a mother who taught him gracious ways, not at all in keeping with the staid manners of a son of the covenants.
* * * * *
"And now, sir," said John Allanson of Drows, turning grimly upon his minister, who stood watching Elspeth's girlish figure disappear round the curve of the green-edged track, "what have you to say to us?"
Then Allan Syme's pulses leaped quick and light, for he knew that of a surety the time of his visitation was at hand. Yet his heart did not fail within him. At the last it was glad and high. "For after all" (he smiled as he thought it), "after all—well, they cannot take that from me."
"Sir," said Matthew Carment, in a louder tone, "heard ye the quastion that your ruling elder hath pitten till ye?"