“Was it that made you fight with the London gentleman and send him—poor soul—to his Maker at five o’clock on a cold winter morning?” “It’s a small world. Who would have thought the gossip of that trivial affair would have travelled to an Edinburgh assembly? Sure you would not have had me put off the occasion till the summer weather; we were both warm enough at the time, I assure you, or that black folly they call a duel had never been engaged in.” “You have the name of—of—I hate to mention it,” said the lady, now grown eager and biting her under lip. “Oh, out with it! out with it! Crown Counsel should never be blate, ma’am; on my word, the talent for cross-examination would seem to run in the family.” “Blackmail and—” said she in a whisper. “One at a time!” said Macdonald. “That’s the prose way of putting it; up north we put it differently. You call it robbery; we call it rent. Some charge the rent by the pennyland or the acre; we charge it by the sound night’s sleep, and the man who rents immunity from his cattle from Barrisdale gets as good value for his money as the man who rents some acres of dirt from Appin.” Madam worked her fan industriously—now she was on his heels, and could not spare so plain a mercenary. “You steal cattle,” was her next charge. “Steal! ma’am,” said Barrisdale, with a frown. “It is not the bonniest word; up north we call it _togail_—lifting. It is an odd world, mistress, and every man of us has to do some sort of lifting for a living—if not in the glen, then in the market-place, where the act is covered in a fine confusion. If we lift a _creach_ now and then in Barrisdale there are other clans that lift from us, and at the season’s end no one is much the worse, and there has been much frolic and diversion.” “On the same reasoning, then, you would justify the attempt at abducting Glen Nant’s rich daughter?” said the lady. “Do you happen to have seen her?” “I have,” said the lady, and could not for her life have kept from smiling. “It was the sight of her spoiled what small romantics I had about the Hielan cateran.” “Are you sure there are none to the fore yet?” “Not a morsel!” said the lady, looking point-blank at his nose. “_Mo thruagh_!” said Macdonald tragically; “then are we indeed forsaken.” “You made a shabby flight, by all accounts, from the lady’s brother.” “Humph!” said he, for the first time disconcerted; indeed, it was a story no way creditable to Clan Macdonald. “I think,” said he, “we’ll better let that flea stick to the wall,” and looked across the room to where his cousin sat glowering in a manifest anxiety. “Oh, Barrisdale, Barrisdale, can ye no’ be a good man?” said Miss Duthie, in a petty lady-like concern, and unable to keep her eyes from that unlucky nose. He put up his hand and covered it. She flushed to the neck that he should so easily have divined her, and he laughed.