'Champagne again!' the old woman said, shaking her head. 'Champagne again! Dear me, it's like a Duke's house——'
'What, ye daft auld craytur? Would ye have me take my cousin Ronald for his first trip to Campsie Glen, and bring out a gill o' whisky in a soda-water bottle?'
'Indeed, Katie, lass, ye needna have brought one thing or the other for me,' he said. 'It's a drop o' water, and nothing else, that will serve my turn.'
'We'll see about that,' she said confidently.
Her provisioning was certainly of a sumptuous nature—far more sumptuous, indeed, than the luncheons the rich Americans used to have carried down for them to the lochside, and a perfect banquet as compared with the frugal bit of cold beef and bread that Lord Ailine and his friends allowed themselves on the hill. Then, as regards the champagne, she would take no refusal—he had to submit. She was in the gayest of moods; she laughed and joked; nay, at one point, she raised her glass aloft, and waved it round her head, and sang—
'O send Lewie Gordon hame,
And the lad I daurna name;
Though his back be at the wa',
Here's to him that's far awa'!'
'What, what, lass?' Ronald cried grimly. 'Are ye thinking ye're in a Highland glen? Do ye think it was frae places like this that the lads were called out to follow Prince Charlie?'