"I can tell him a fine tale of a loyal
daughter."

"O, I do not think I will be a loyal girl, at all events," she cried,
with a great deal of painfulness in the expression. "I do not think my
heart is true."

"Yet there are very few that would have made that leap, and all to obey
a father's orders," I observed.

"I cannot have you to be thinking of me so," she cried again. "When you
had done that same, how would I stop behind? And at all events that was
not all the reasons." Whereupon, with a burning face, she told me the
plain truth upon her poverty.

"Good guide us!" cried I, "what kind of daft-like proceeding is this, to
let yourself be launched on the continent of Europe with an empty purse;
I count it hardly decent--scant decent!" I cried.

"You forget James More, my father, is a poor gentleman," said she. "He
is a hunted exile."

"But I think not all your friends are hunted exiles," I exclaimed. "And
was this fair to them that care for you? Was it fair to me? was it fair
to Miss Grant, that counselled you to go, and would be driven fair
horn-mad if she could hear of it? Was it even fair to these Gregory folk
that you were living with, and used you lovingly? It's a blessing you
have fallen in my hands! Suppose your father hindered by an accident,
what would become of you here, and you your lee-lone in a strange place?
The thought of the thing frightens me," I said.

"I will have lied to all of them," she replied. "I will have told them
all that I had plenty. I told _her_ too. I could not be lowering James
More to them."

I found out later on that she must have lowered him in the very dust,
for the lie was originally the father's, not the daughter's, and she
thus obliged to persevere in it for the man's reputation. But at the
time I was ignorant of this, and the mere thought of her destitution and
the perils in which she must have fallen, had ruffled me almost beyond
reason.

"Well, well, well," said I, "you will have to learn more sense."

I left her mails for the moment in an inn upon the shore, where I got a
direction for Sprott's house in my new French, and we walked there--it
was some little way--beholding the place with wonder as we went. Indeed,
there was much for Scots folk to admire: canals and trees being
intermingled with the houses; the houses, each within itself, of a brave
red brick, the colour of a rose, with steps and benches of blue marble
at the cheek of every door, and the whole town