“Just that! just that! not very different, but still a little skew. Lord! man, you cannot expect to have all the graces as well as all the virtues. Madam picked you out at all events, and I was not in the key to contradict her. She paid you (or was it me?) the compliment of saying you were not at all like her idea of a man with the repute of Barrisdale.” “Very likely! Indeed, I could guess she was more put out at that than at finding herself speaking to a scamp who laughed at his own misdeeds. You made a false move; Jock, had you admitted you were the man, she would not have been greatly mortified. In any case, she thought to improve the occasion with advice. She told me to be good!” Barrisdale could hardly speak for laughing. “You kept up the play at any rate,” said he, “for when I saw her to her chair, ‘Yon’s an awful man, your cousin,’ said she. What do you think of her?” “Something of a simpleton, something of a sentimentalist, and a very bonny face forbye to judge by her chin—that was all of it I saw.” “She kept too tight a mask for even me to see her face. Man, ye’ve missed her chief charm—she has twa thousand a year of her own. I had it from herself, so you see I’m pretty far ben. With half a chance I could make a runaway match of it; I’m sure I took her fancy.” “Tuts! Jock. I thought you had enough of runaway matches; take care she has not got a brother,” said Macdonald. Jaunty Jock scowled in the dark, but made no answer. Their lodging was in a land deep down in the Wynd. Flat on flat it rose for fourteen stories, poverty in its dunnies (as they called its cellars), poverty in its attics, and between the two extremes the wonderfullest variety of households bien or wealthy—the homes of writers, clerks, ministers, shopkeepers, tradesmen, gentlemen reduced, a countess, and a judge—for there, though the Macdonalds did not know, dwelt Lord Duthie with his daughter. In daytime the traffic of the steep scale stair went like the road to a fair, at night the passages were black and still as vaults. “A fine place the town, no doubt,” said Jaunty Jock, “but, lord, give me the hills for it!”