“No, no, Mr. MacKellar,” said I hurriedly, unwilling to let us part like that, “I'm swithering here just because I'm like yoursel' of it and under a cloud of my own.” “Dod! Is that so?” said he quite cheerfully again, and clapping down, “then I'm all the better pleased that the thing that made the roebuck swim the loch--and that's necessity--as the other man said, should have driven me over here to precognosce you. But when you say you are under a cloud, that is to make another way of it altogether, and I will not be asking you over, for there is a gentleman there among the five of us who might be making trouble of it.” “Have you a brother in Glasgow College?” says I suddenly, putting a question that had been in my mind ever since he had mentioned his name. “Indeed, and I have that,” said he quickly, “but now he is following the law in Edinburgh, where I am in the hopes it will be paying him better than ever it paid me that has lost two fine old castles and the best part of a parish by the same. You'll not be sitting there and telling me surely that you know my young brother Alasdair?” “Man! him and me lodged together in Lucky Grant's, in Crombie's Land in the High Street, for two Sessions,” said I. “What!” said MacKellar. “And you'll be the lad that snow-balled the bylie, and your name will be Greig?” As he said it he bent to look under the table, then drew up suddenly with a startled face and a whisper of a whistle on his lips. “My goodness!” said he, in a cautious tone, “and that beats all. You'll be the lad that broke jyle with the priest that shot at Buhot, and there you are, you _amadain_, like a gull with your red brogues on you, crying 'come and catch me' in two languages. I'm telling you to keep thae feet of yours under this table till we're out of here, if it should be the morn's morning. No--that's too long, for by the morn's morning Buhot's men will be at the Hôtel Dieu, and the end of the story will be little talk and the sound of blows, as the other man said.” Every now and then as he spoke he would look over his shoulder with a quick glance at his friends--a very anxious man, but no more anxious than Paul Greig. “Mercy on us!” said I, “do you tell me you ken all that?” “I ken a lot more than that,” said he, “but that's the latest of my budget, and I'm giving it to you for the sake of the shoes and my brother Alasdair, that is a writer in Edinburgh. There's not two Scotchmen drinking a bowl in Paris town this night that does not ken your description, and it's kent by them at the other table there--where better?--but because you have that coat on you that was surely made for you when you were in better health, as the other man said, and because your long trams of legs and red shoes are under the table there's none of them suspects you. And now that I'm thinking of it, I would not go near the hospital place again.”