“Is it indeed?” asked he, turning on me a pitiful eye; “I’m wrong if you ever met but one that was quite so fine as you must have them---- Tuts, tuts, here I’m on the key of old man’s history. I cheat myself at times of leisure into the notion that once I loved a foreign girl who died a spotless maiden. You’ll notice, Master Gordon, I have something of the sentiment you Low-landers make such show of, or I play-act the thing very well. Believe me, I’ll hope to get a wife out of your parish some day yet; but I warn you she must have a tocher in her stocking as well as on her father’s hill.” The minister surveyed him through half-shut eyes, leaning back on the rungs of his chair. I think he saw the truth as clearly as I did myself, for he spoke with more than common softness when he answered. “I like your tale,” he said, “which had a different conclusion and a more noble one than what I looked for at the opening.” Then he leaned out and put a hand on John Splendid’s sleeve. “Human nature,” said he, “is the most baffling of mysteries. I said I knew you from boot to bonnet, but there’s a corner here I have still to learn the secret of.” “Well, well,” cried M’Iver, lifting a glass confusedly, and seating himself again at the board, “here’s a night-cap--MacCailein Mor and the Campbell cause!” “And a thought for the lady of Regenwalde,” I whispered, pressing his foot with my toe beneath the table, and clinking my glass with his. We drank, the two of us, in a silence, and threw the glasses on the hearth. The windows, that now were shuttered, rattled to gowsty airs, and the rain drummed on. All about the house, with its numerous corners, turrets, gussets, and corbie-stepped gables, the fury of the world rose and wandered, the fury that never rests but is ever somewhere round the ancient universe, jibing night and morning at man’s most valiant effort. It might spit and blow till our shell shook and creaked, and the staunch walls wept, and the garden footways ran with bubbling waters, but we were still to conquer. Our lanthorn gleamed defiance to that brag of night eternal, that pattern-piece of the last triumph of the oldest enemy of man--Blackness the Rider, who is older than the hoary star. Fresh wood hissed on the fire, but the candles burned low in their sockets. Sonachan and the baron-bailie slept with their heads on the table, and the man with the want, still sodden at the eyes, turned his wet hose upon his feet with a madman’s notion of comfort. “I hope,” said M’Iver, “there’s no ambuscade here, as in the house of the cousin of his Grace of Pomerania. At least we can but bide on, whatever comes, and take the night’s rest that offers, keeping a man-about watch against intrusion.”