"Gien ye please, sir, my lord," replied Stoat, "the Lossie Airms' horses is ordered a'ready for Lady Clementina."
"Will my Lady Clementina oblige me by yielding her horses to Lady Bellair?" said Malcolm, turning to her.
"Certainly, my lord," answered Clementina.
"You, I trust, my lady," said Malcolm, "will stay a little longer with my sister."
Lady Bellair came up. "My lord," she said, "is this the marquis or the fisherman's way of treating a lady?"
"Neither. But do not drive me to give the rein to my tongue. Let it be enough to say that my house shall never be what your presence would make it." He turned to the fishermen: "Three of you take that lord to the town-gate, and leave him on the other side of it. His servant shall follow as soon as the horses come."
"I will go with you," said Florimel, crossing to Lady Bellair.
Malcolm took her by the arm. For one moment she struggled, but, finding no one dared interfere, submitted, and was led from the room like a naughty child.
"Keep my lord there till I return," he said as he went.
He led her into the room which had been her mother's boudoir, and when he had shut the door, "Florimel," he said, "I have striven to serve you the best way I knew. Your father, when he confessed me his heir, begged me to be good to you, and I promised him. Would I have given all these months of my life to the poor labor of a groom, allowed my people to be wronged and oppressed, my grandfather to be a wanderer, and my best friend to sit with his lips of wisdom sealed, but for your sake? I can hardly say it was for my father's sake, for I should have done the same had he never said a word about you. Florimel, I loved my sister, and longed for her goodness. But she has foiled all my endeavors. She has not loved or followed the truth. She has been proud and disdainful, and careless of right. Yourself young and pure, and naturally recoiling from evil, you have yet cast from you the devotion of a noble, gifted, large-hearted and great-souled man for the miserable preference of the smallest, meanest, vilest of men. Nor that only; for with him you have sided against the woman he most bitterly wrongs, and therein you wrong the nature and the God of women. Once more I pray you to give up this man—to let your true self speak and send him away."