“He was to make you take me,” I replied, “and I would not have it. I said you should be free, and I must speak with you alone; little I supposed it would be such a speaking! ‘_And what if I refuse_?’ said he.—‘_Then it must come to the throat-cutting_,’ says I, ‘_for I will no more have a husband forced on that young lady_, _than what I would have a wife forced upon myself_.’ These were my words, they were a friend’s words; bonnily have I paid for them! Now you have refused me of your own clear free will, and there lives no father in the Highlands, or out of them, that can force on this marriage. I will see that your wishes are respected; I will make the same my business, as I have all through. But I think you might have that decency as to affect some gratitude. ’Deed, and I thought you knew me better! I have not behaved quite well to you, but that was weakness. And to think me a coward, and such a coward as that—O, my lass, there was a stab for the last of it!” “Davie, how would I guess?” she cried. “O, this is a dreadful business! Me and mine,”—she gave a kind of a wretched cry at the word—“me and mine are not fit to speak to you. O, I could be kneeling down to you in the street, I could be kissing your hands for forgiveness!” “I will keep the kisses I have got from you already,” cried I. “I will keep the ones I wanted and that were something worth; I will not be kissed in penitence.” “What can you be thinking of this miserable girl?” says she. “What I am trying to tell you all this while!” said I, “that you had best leave me alone, whom you can make no more unhappy if you tried, and turn your attention to James More, your father, with whom you are like to have a queer pirn to wind.” “O, that I must be going out into the world alone with such a man!” she cried, and seemed to catch herself in with a great effort. “But trouble yourself no more for that,” said she. “He does not know what kind of nature is in my heart. He will pay me dear for this day of it; dear, dear, will he pay.” She turned, and began to go home and I to accompany her. At which she stopped. “I will be going alone,” she said. “It is alone I must be seeing him.” Some little time I raged about the streets, and told myself I was the worst used lad in Christendom. Anger choked me; it was all very well for me to breathe deep; it seemed there was not air enough about Leyden to supply me, and I thought I would have burst like a man at the bottom of the sea. I stopped and laughed at myself at a street corner a minute together, laughing out loud, so that a passenger looked at me, which brought me to myself. “Well,” I thought, “I have been a gull and a ninny and a soft Tommy long enough. Time it was done. Here is a good lesson to have nothing to do with that accursed sex, that was the ruin of the man in the beginning and will be so to the end. God knows I was happy enough before ever I saw her; God knows I can be happy enough again when I have seen the last of her.”