"I said nothing of the affair to you," he continued; "I thought to let the thing go by, and went off to Glasgow, hoping to forget it before we met again. And what do I come back to? To learn that half the town has it that you've visited an inn in another county and spent your days, aye, and I suppose they say your nights, too, with Rab Burns, whom decent folk will not let their daughters know. At tales like this the affair takes on another complexion. I do not want a wife for myself, nor a mother for my children, whose name has been bandied about like that!" He was so beside himself with rage and jealousy and the further present annoyance of Nancy's inattention, that he raised his voice at the end to a tone of harshness, such as none had ever used to Nancy Stair, and which she was the last woman to stand patient under. She did the thing by instinct which would enrage him most, putting a thread to her needle, squinting up one eye as she did so, in a composed and usual manner, and letting a silence fall before she said, in a level and unemotional voice: "Sit down, Dandy, and stop shouting. There's no use getting the town-guard out because you chance not to want me any longer for a wife. You don't have to have me, you know!" He seemed somewhat dashed by this, and there was a pause, during which he took a paper from his pocket and cast it on the table before her. "No," he says, "and that's very true; but for your own sake as the Lord of Stair's daughter, I'd write no more verses like these. God!" he cried, "to think of that white-faced American having a thing like that from you!" "What's the matter with the writing?" she said, looking down at it as though its literary merit were the thing he questioned. "Mr. Hastings," she explained, "had an old song called the Trail of the Gipsies, and he rather flouted me because I set such store by it, but had it lined and sent me with some flowers. On the minute of their coming, and with the thought of how little the Anglo-Saxon comprehends any race save his own, I wrote these lines. I see no harm in them!" As Nancy read the poem[7] over she looked up with the same curious look. [7] A thousand thanks for the verses, And the thoughts that they bring from you, But it's only a gipsy-woman Who can feel how the trail holds true. You of the Pilgrim fathers, With your face so proud and pale, And the birth born pain of a fettered brain, What can ye know of the trail? By the lawless folk who bore me, By their passion and pain, and loss, By their swords which strove and their Lights o' Love, I've a right to the gipsy cross. * * * * * Poems by Nancy Stair. Edinburgh Edition, 1796. "What's the matter with it?" she asked again.