Argile took a grateful glance at me. “You know what I am,” he said, “not a man of the happy, single mood like our friend Barbreck here, but tossed between philosophies. I am paying bitterly for my pliability, for who so much the sport of life as the man who knows right well the gait he should gang, and prays fervently to be permitted to follow it, but sometimes stumbles in the ditch? Monday, oh Monday; I must be at Edinburgh and face them all! Tis that dauntons me.” His eyes seemed to swim in blood, as he looked at me, or through me, aghast at the horror of his situation, and sweat stood in blobs upon his brow. “That,” he went on, “weighs me down like lead. Here about me my people know me, and may palliate the mistake of a day by the recollection of a lifetime’s honour. I blame Auchinbreac; I blame the chieftains,--they said I must take to the galley; I blame----” “Blame no one, Argile,” said Master Gordon, standing up before him, not a second too soon, for his lordship had his hand on the dirk M’Iver had thrown down. Then he turned to us with ejecting arms. “Out you go,” he cried sternly, “out you go; what delight have you in seeing a nobleman on the rack?” As the door closed behind us we could hear Argile sob. Seventeen years later, if I may quit the thread of my history and take in a piece that more properly belongs to the later adventures of John Splendid, I saw my lord die by the maiden. Being then in his tail, I dined with him and his friends the day before he died, and he spoke with exceeding cheerfulness of that hour M’Iver and I found him in bed in Inneraora. “You saw me at my worst,” said he, “on two occasions; bide till to-morrow and you’ll see me at my best I never unmasked to mortal man till that day Gordon put you out of my room.” I stayed and saw him die; I saw his head up and his chin in the air as behoved his quality, that day he went through that noisy, crowded, causied Edinburgh--Edinburgh of the doleful memories, Edinburgh whose ports I never enter till this day but I feel a tickling at the nape of my neck, as where a wooden collar should lie before the shear fall. “A cool enough reception this,” said M’Iver, as we left the gate. “It was different last year, when we went up together on your return from Low Germanie. Then MacCailein was in the need of soldiers, now he’s in the need of priests, who gloze over his weakness with their prayers.” “You are hardly fair either to the one or the other,” I said. “Argile, whom I went in to meet to-day with a poor regard for him, turns out a better man than I gave him credit for being; he has at least the grace to grieve about a great error of judgment, or weakness of the spirit, whichever it may be. And as for Master Gordon, I’ll take off my hat to him. Yon’s no type of the sour, dour, anti-prelatics; he comes closer on the perfect man and soldier than any man I ever met.” M’Iver looked at me with a sign of injured vanity.