nd while
he was wondering about it in a vague, drunken way, Robert came out of
an inner room, white with scornful anger, and in a most quarrelsome
mood.

"You have made a nice fool of yoursel', David Callendar! Flinging awa
so much gude gold for a speech and a glass o' whiskey! Ugh!"

"You may think so, Robert. The Leslies have always been 'rievers and
thievers;' but the Callendars are of another stock."

"The Callendars are like ither folk--good and bad, and mostly bad.
Money, not honor, rules the warld in these days; and when folk have
turned spinners, what is the use o' talking about honor! Profit is a
word more fitting."

"I count mysel' no less a Callendar than my great-grandfather, Evan
Callendar, who led the last hopeless charge on Culloden. If I am a
spinner, I'll never be the first to smirch the roll o' my house with
debt and dishonesty, if I can help it."

"Fair nonsense! The height of nonsense! Your ancestors indeed! Mules
make a great to-do about their ancestors having been horses!"

David retorted with hot sarcasm on the freebooting Leslies, and their
kin the Armstrongs and Kennedys; and to Scotchmen this is the very
sorest side of a quarrel. They can forgive a bitter word against
themselves perhaps, but against their clan, or their dead, it is an
unpardonable offence. And certainly Robert had an unfair advantage; he
was in a cool, wicked temper of envy and covetousness. He could have
struck himself for not having foreseen that old John Callendar would
be sure to clear the name of dishonor, and thus let David and his
L20,000 slip out of his control.

David had drunk enough to excite all the hereditary fight in his
nature, and not enough to dull the anger and remorse he felt for
having drunk anything at all. The dreary, damp atmosphere and the
cold, sloppy turf of Glasgow Green might have brought them back to the
ordinary cares and troubles of every-day life, but it did not. This
grim oasis in the very centre of the hardest and bitterest existences
was now deserted. The dull, heavy swash of the dirty Clyde and the
distant hum of the sorrowful voices of humanity in the adjacent
streets hardly touched the sharp, cutting accents of the two
quarrelling men. No human ears heard them, and no human eyes saw the
uplifted hands and the sway and fall of Robert Leslie upon the smutty
and half melted snow, except David's.

Yes; David saw him fall, and heard with a strange terror the peculiar
thud and the long