luck flung after me. It had just one horse, and I mind how
I cried to Esther Auld, wha had been the first to throw, that when I
came back it would be in a carriage and pair.

"Ay, I had pride! In the carriage your father telled me as a joke that
he had got away without paying the supper, and that about all the money
he had now, forby what was to pay our tickets to London, was the
half-sovereign on his watch-chain. But I was determined to have Thrums
think I had married grand, and as I had three pound six on me, the
savings o' all my days, I gave two pound of it to Malcolm Crabb, the
driver, unbeknown to your father, but pretending it was frae him, and
telled him to pay for the supper and the carriage with it. He said it
was far ower muckle, but I just laughed, and said wealthy gentlemen like
Mr. Sandys couldna be bothered to take back change, so Malcolm could
keep what was ower. Malcolm was the man Esther Auld had just married,
and I counted on this maddening her and on Malcolm's spreading the story
through the town. Laddie, I've kent since syne what it is to be without
bite or sup, but I've never grudged that siller."

The poor woman had halted many times in her tale, and she was glad to
make an end. "You've forgotten what a life he led me in London," she
said, "and it could do you no good to hear it, though it might be a
lesson to thae lassies at the dancing-school wha think so much o'
masterful men. It was by betting at horseraces that your father made a
living, and whiles he was large o' siller, but that didna last, and I
question whether he would have stuck to me if I hadna got work. Well,
he's gone, and the Thrums folk'll soon ken the truth about Jean Myles
now."

She paused, and then cried, with extraordinary vehemence: "Oh, man, how
I wish I could keep it frae them for ever and ever!"

But presently she was calm again and she said: "What I've been telling
you, you can understand little o' the now, but some of it will come
back to you when you're a grown man, and if you're magerful and have
some lassie in your grip, maybe for the memory of her that bore you,
you'll let the poor thing awa'."

And she asked him to add this to his nightly prayer: "O God, keep me
from being a magerful man!" and to teach this other prayer to Elspeth,
"O God, whatever is to be my fate, may I never be one of them that bow
the knee to magerful men, and if I was born like that and canna help it,
oh, take me up to heaven afore I'm fi