But Gavan ignored his angry champion. Mrs. MacHendrie’s sorrow, most evidently, interested him more than Eppie’s indignation. He went to her, putting down the hand that held the shawl to the poor, disfigured, tallow face, and made her look at him, while he said with a gentle reasonableness: “Don’t mind what Miss Gifford says; she is angry on my account and doesn’t really mean to be so hard on you. I’m not at all badly hurt,--I can perfectly stand alone, Eppie,--and I’m sorry I had to hurt your husband. It was perfectly natural, what you did. Don’t cry; please don’t cry.” He smiled at her, comforted her, encouraged her. “They are taking your husband home, you see; he is going quite quietly. And now we will take you home. Take my arm. You are the worst off of us all, Mrs. MacHendrie.” Eppie, in silence, stalked beside him while he led Mrs. MacHendrie, dazed and submissive, up the village street. A neighbor’s wife was in kindly waiting and Archie already slumbering heavily on his bed. Eppie suspected, as they went, that she saw a gold piece slipped from Gavan’s hand to Mrs. MacHendrie’s. “Poor thing,” he said, when they were once more climbing the steep street, “I ‘m afraid I only made things worse for her”; and laughing a little, irrepressibly, he looked round at Eppie from under his oddly becoming bandage. “My dear Eppie, what a perfect brute you were to her!” “My dear Gavan, I can’t feel pity for such a fool. Oh, yes I can, but I don’t want to. Please remember that I, too, have impulses, and that I saw you ‘a’ bluid.’” “Well, then, I’m the brute for scolding you, and you are another poor thing.” “Are you incapable of righteous indignation, Gavan?” “Surely I showed enough to please you in my treatment of Archie.” “You showed none. You looked supremely indifferent as to whether he killed you or you him.” “Oh, I think I was quite anxious to do for him.” They were past the village now and upon the country road, and in the darkness their contrasting voices rang oddly--hers deep with its resentful affection, his light with its amusement. It was as if the little drama, that he had made instead of interrupting, struck his sense of the ridiculous. Yet, angry with him as she was, a thrill of exultation remained, for Eppie, in the thought of his calm, deliberate face, beautiful before its foe, and with blood upon it. VIII