I knew all the while that her eyes were burning auger holes into me. But I could not raise my awkward coltish face to hers. She stood a little more erect, waiting for me to speak again. I could see so much without looking. Whereat, after many trials, I mustered up courage to go on. “Mind you not the lad who brought you down from the Bennan top so long ago, and took you under cloud of night to the tower of Lochinvar on the raft beneath the shelter of beech leaves?” I knew there was a kindly interest growing now in her eyes. But, dolt that I was, I could not meet them a whit the more readily because of that. “I scarcely remember aught of it,” she said, “yet I have been told a hundred times the tale of your bringing me home to my aunt at Lochinvar. It is somewhat belated, but I thank you, sir, for your courtesy.” “Nay,” said I, “’tis all I have to be thankful for in my poor life, that I took you safely past the cruel persecutors.” She gave me a quick, strange look. “Yet now do I not see you ready to ride and persecute in your turn?” These words, from the daughter of Alexander Gordon of Earlstoun, who was scarcely yet liberate from the prison of Blackness, astonished me so much that I stood speechless. “To persecute in my turn?” said I. “Nay, my dear mistress, I go to uphold the banner of Christ’s Kingdom against those that hate Him.” Very scornfully she smiled. “In my short life,” she said, “I’ve heard overmuch of such talk. I know to an ell how much it means. I have a mother, and she has friends and gossips. To me the triumph of what you call ‘the Kingdom’ means but two things--the Pharisee exalted and the bigot triumphant. Prince Jacob of Orange may supplant his father and take the crown; every canting Jack may fling away the white rose and shout for the Orange lily. But not I--not I?” She flaunted a little white hand suddenly palm upward, like an apple blossom blown off the branch by the wind. To say that I was astounded by this outbreak is to say little. It was like an earthquake, the trembling and resolving of solid land under my feet. Alexander Gordon’s child--“the Bull of Earlstoun’s” daughter--standing openly and boldly for the cause of those who had prisoned and, perhaps, tortured her father, and brought about the ruin of her house! At last I managed to speak. “You are a young maiden,” I said, as quietly as I could, “and you know nothing of the great occasions of state, the persecutions of twenty-five years, the blood shed on lonely hillsides, the deaths by yet wearier sickness, the burials under cloud of night of those who have suffered----!” I would have said more, but that she prevented me imperiously.