“An’ whaur wad be the guid o’ that, mem? By yer ain shawin’, he wad rin oot o’ ’s verra body to win awa’ frae ye.” “I did not mean by force,” returned Mrs Stewart. “Some one he has confidence in must come with him. Nothing else will give me a chance. He would trust you now; your presence would keep him from being terrified--at his own mother, alas! through you he would learn to trust me; and if a course of absolute indulgence did not bring him to live like other people--that of course is impossible --it might at least induce him to live at home, and cease to be a byword to the neighbourhood.” Her tone was so refined, and her voice so pleading; her sorrow was so gentle; and she looked, in the dimness, to Malcolm’s imagination at least, so young and handsome, that the strong castle of his prejudices was swaying as if built on reeds; and had it not been that he was already the partizan of her son, and therefore in honour bound to give _him_ the benefit of every doubt, he would certainly have been gained over to work her will. He _knew_ absolutely nothing against her--not even that she was the person he had seen in Mrs Catanach’s company in the garret of Lossie House. But he steeled himself to distrust her, and held his peace. “It is clear,” she resumed after a pause, “that the intervention of some friend of both is the only thing that can be of the smallest use. I know you are a friend of his--a true one, and I do not see why you should not be a friend of mine as well.--Will you be my friend too?” She rose as she said the words, and approaching him, bent on him out of the shadow the full strength of eyes whose light had not yet begun to pale before the dawn we call death, and held out a white hand glimmering in the dusk: she knew only too well the power of a still fine woman of any age over a youth of twenty. Malcolm, knowing nothing about it, yet felt hers, and was on his guard. He rose also, but did not take her hand. “I have had only too much reason,” she added, “to distrust some who, unlike you, professed themselves eager to serve me; but I know neither Lord Lossie nor you will play me false.” She took his great rough hand between her two soft palms, and for one moment Malcolm was tempted--not to betray his friend, but to simulate a yielding sympathy, in order to come at the heart of her intent, and should it prove false, to foil it the more easily. But the honest nature of him shrunk from deception, even where the object of it was good: he was not at liberty to use falsehood for the discomfiture of the false even; a pretended friendship was of the vilest of despicable things, and the more holy the end, the less fit to be used for the compassing of it--least of all in the cause of a true friendship. “I canna help ye, mem,” he said; “I daurna. I hae sic a regaird for yer son ’at afore I wad du onything to hairm him, I wad hae my twa han’s chappit frae the shackle-bane.”