After an hour had passed like a moment in their expressions of mutual affection, Lady Staunton observed the Captain walking with impatient steps below the window. "That tiresome Highland fool has returned upon our hands," she said. "I will pray him to grace us with his absence."
"Hout no! hout no!" said Mrs. Butler, in a tone of entreaty; "ye maunna affront the Captain."
"Affront?" said Lady Staunton; "nobody is ever affronted at what I do or say, my dear. However, I will endure him, since you think it proper."
The Captain was accordingly graciously requested by Lady Staunton to remain during dinner. During this visit his studious and punctilious complaisance towards the lady of rank was happily contrasted by the cavalier air of civil familiarity in which he indulged towards the minister's wife.
"I have not been able to persuade Mrs. Butler," said Lady Staunton to the Captain, during the interval when Jeanie had left the parlour, "to let me talk of making any recompense for storming her house, and garrisoning it in the way I have done."
"Doubtless, matam," said the Captain, "it wad ill pecome Mrs. Putler, wha is a very decent pody, to make any such sharge to a lady who comes from my house, or his Grace's, which is the same thing.—And speaking of garrisons, in the year forty-five, I was poot with a garrison of twenty of my lads in the house of Inver-Garry, whilk had near been unhappily, for"
"I beg your pardon, sir—But I wish I could think of some way of indemnifying this good lady."
"O, no need of intemnifying at all—no trouble for her, nothing at all— So, peing in the house of Inver-Garry, and the people about it being uncanny, I doubted the warst, and"
"Do you happen to know, sir," said Lady Staunton, "if any of these two lads, these young Butlers, I mean, show any turn for the army?"
"Could not say, indeed, my leddy," replied Knockdunder—"So, I knowing the people to pe unchancy, and not to lippen to, and hearing a pibroch in the wood, I pegan to pid my lads look to their flints, and then"