For the first time, I was seized with a jealousy of him. Here was I, your arrant rustic; he was as composed as could be, overflowing with happy thoughts, laughable incident, and ever ready with the compliment or the retort women love to hear from a smart fellow of even indifferent character. I ic had the policy to conceal the vanity that was for ordinary his most transparent feature, and his trick was to admire the valour and the humour of others. Our wanderings in Lorn and I-ochaber, our adventures with the MacDonalds, all the story of the expedition, he danced through, as it were, on the tip-toe of light phrase, as if it had Ixrcn a strong man’s scheme of recreation, scarcely once appealing to ma With a Mushed cheek and parted lips the lady hung upon his words, arched her dark eyebrows in fear, or bubbled into the merriest laughter as the occasion demanded. Worst of all, she teemed to share his amusement at my silence, and then I could have wished rather than a bag of gold I had the Mull witch’s invisible coat, or that the earth would swallow me up. The very country-people passing on the way were art and part in the conspiracy of circumstances to make me unhappy. Their salutes were rarely for Elrigmore, but for the lady and John Splendid, whose bold quarrel with MacCailein Mor was now the rumour of two parishes, and gave him a wide name for unflinching bravery of a kind he had been generally acknowledged as sadly want ing in before. And Mistress Betty could not but see that high or low, I was second to this fellow going off--or at least with the rumour of it--to Hebron’s cavaliers in France before the week-end. M’Iver was just, perhaps, carrying his humour at my cost a little too far for my temper, which was never readily stirred, but flamed fast enough when set properly alowe, and Betty--here too your true woman wit--saw it sooner than he did himself, quick enough in the uptake though he was. He had returned again to his banter about the supposititious girl I was trysted with up the glen, and my face showed my annoyance. “You think all men like yourself,” said the girl to him, “and all women the same--like the common soldier you are.” “I think them all darlings,” he confessed, laughing; “God bless them, kind and foolish----” “As you’ve known them oftenest,” she supplied, coldly. “Or sedate and sensible,” he went on. “None of them but found John M’Iver of Barbeck their very true cavalier.”