“Your courage, sir,” said I, “has been proved; it is the inheritance of your race. But I dare not strain my conscience, my lord, much as I love and honour your house, to say I could comprehend or concur in the extraordinary retirement you made from these parts when our need for your presence was the sorest.” “I thank you for that, Elrigmore,” said his lordship, cordially. “You say no more now than you showed by your face (and perhaps said too) on the night the beacon flamed on Dunchuach. To show that I value your frankness--that my kinsman here seems to fancy a flaw ol character--I’ll be explicit on the cause of my curious behaviour in this crisis. When I was a boy I was brought up loyally to our savage Highland tradition, that feuds were to carry on, and enemies to confound, and that no logic under heaven should keep the claymore in its sheath while an old grudge was to wipe out in blood or a wrong to right.” “A most sensible and laudable doctrine!” cried M’Iver. “With that and no more of a principle in life--except paying your way among friends--a good man of his hands could make a very snug and reputable progress through the world.” “Some men might,” said Argile, calmly; “I do not know whether to envy or pity their kind. But they are not my kind. I think I bore myself not ungracefully in the Cabinet, in the field too, so long as I took my father’s logic without question. But I have read, I have pondered----” “Just so,” whispered M’Iver, not a bit abashed that a sneer was in his interjection and his master could behold it. “--And I have my doubts about the righteousness of much of our warfare, either before my day or now. I have brought the matter to my closet I have prayed----” “Pshaw!” exclaimed M’Iver, but at once he asked pardon. “--I am a man come--or wellnigh come--to the conclusion that his life was never designed by the Creator to be spent in the turmoil of faction and field. There is, I allow, a kind of man whom strife sets off, a middling good man in his way, perhaps, with a call to the sword whose justice he has never questioned. I have studied the philosophies; I have reflected on life--this unfathomable problem--and ‘fore God I begin to doubt my very right to wear a breastplate against the poignard of fate. Dubiety plays on me like a flute.” To all this I listened soberly, at the time comprehending that this was a gentleman suffering from the disease of being unable to make up his mind. I would have let him go on in that key while he pleasured it, for it’s a vein there’s no remedy for at the time being; but M’Iver was not of such tolerant stuff as I. He sat with an amazed face till his passion simmered over into a torrent of words.