“We are a different stuff from the lady you mention,” he said; “I am aye thinking the Almighty put us into this land of rocks and holds, and scalloped coast, cold, hunger, and the chase, just to keep ourselves warm by quarrelling with each other. If we had not the recreation now and then of a bit splore with the sword, we should be lazily rotting to decay. The world’s well divided after all, and the happiness as well as the dule of it. It is because I have never had the pleasure of wife nor child I am a little better off to-day than the weeping folks about me, and they manage to make up their share of content with reflections upon the sweetness of revenge. There was never a man so poor and miserable in this world yet but he had his share of it, even if he had to seek it in the bottle. Amn’t I rather clever to think of it now? Have you heard of the idea in your classes?” “It is a notion very antique,” I confessed, to his annoyance; “but it is always to your credit to have thought it out for yourself. It is a notion discredited here and there by people of judgment, but a very comfortable delusion (if it is one) for such as are well off, and would salve their consciences against the miseries of the poor and distressed. And perhaps, after all, you and the wise man of old are right; the lowest state--even the swineherd’s--may have as many compensations as that of his master the Earl. It is only sin, as my father would say, that keeps the soul in a welter------” “Does it indeed?” said John, lightly; “the merriest men ever I met were rogues. I’ve had some vices myself in foreign countries, though I aye had the grace never to mention them, and I ken I ought to be stewing with remorse for them, but am I?” “Are you?” I asked. “If you put it so straight, I’ll say No--save at my best, and my best is my rarest But come, come, we are not going into Inneraora on a debate-parade; let us change the subject Do you know I’m like a boy with a sweet-cake in this entrance to our native place. I would like not to gulp down the experience all at once like a glutton, but to nibble round the edges of it We’ll take the highway by the shoulder of Creag Dubh, and let the loch slip into our view.” I readily enough fell in with a plan that took us a bit off our way, for I was in a glow of eagerness and apprehension. My passion to come home was as great as on the night I rode up from Skipness after my seven years of war, even greater perhaps, for I was returning to a home now full of more problems than then. The restitution of my father’s house was to be set about, six months of hard stint were perhaps to be faced by my people, and, above all, I had to find out how it stood between a certain lady and me.