He looked at me with an envy in every feature, from me to his companions, from them to the country round about us, and then to himself as to a stranger whose career was revealed in every rag of his clothing. “So,” said he; “you are the lucky man to be of the breed of the elect of heaven, to get what you want for the mere desire of it, and perhaps without deserve. Here am I at my prime and over it, and no glisk of the future before me. I must be ever stumbling on, a carouser of life in a mirk and sodden lane.” “You cannot know my meaning,” I cried. “I know it fine,” said he. “You get what you want because you are the bairn of content. And I’m but the child of hurry (it’s the true word), and I must be seeking and I must be trying to the bitter end.” He kicked, as he walked, at the knolls of snow in his way, and lashed at the bushes with a hazel wand he had lifted from a tree. “Not all I want, perhaps,” said I; “for do you know that fleeing thus from the disgrace of my countrymen, I could surrender every sorrow and every desire to one notion about--about--about----” “A girl of the middle height,” said he, “and her name is----” “Do not give it an utterance,” I cried. “I would be sorry to breathe her name in such a degradation. Degradation indeed, and yet if I had the certainty that I was a not altogether hopeless suitor yonder, I would feel a conqueror greater than Hector or Gilian-of-the-Axe.” “Ay, ay,” said John. “I would not wonder. And I’ll swear that a man of your fate may have her if he wants her. I’ll give ye my notion of wooing; it’s that with the woman free and the man with some style and boldness, he may have whoever he will.” “I would be sorry to think it,” said I; “for that might apply to suitors at home in Inneraora as well as me.” M’Iver laughed at the sally, and “Well, well,” said he, “we are not going to be debating the chance of love on Leven-side, with days and nights of slinking in the heather and the fern between us and our home.” Though this conversation of ours may seem singularly calm and out of all harmony with our circumstances, it is so only on paper, for in fact it took but a minute or two of our time as we walked down among those whins that inspired me with the peaceful premonition of the coming years. We were walking, the seven of us, not in a compact group, but scattered, and at the whins when we rested we sat in ones and twos behind the bushes, with eyes cast anxiously along the shore for sign of any craft that might take us over. What might seem odd to any one who does not know the shrinking mood of men broken with a touch of disgrace in their breaking, was that for long we studiously said nothing of the horrors we had left behind us. Five men fleeing from a disastrous field and two new out of the clutches of a conquering foe, we were dumb or discoursed of affairs very far removed from the reflection that we were a clan at extremities.