keshift to serve a purpose. If you think I would hold your
daughter to it--"

"Hut, tut, man! what will ye be havering about! Ye'll never cast the
poor bit lassie off that way! Ye canna, if ye would; her Church will
have a word to say to that."

For all his aping the manner of the ignored father, I shrewdly suspected
that he knew more about the ins and outs of our affair than he owned to.
Nevertheless, I was forced to meet him on his own ground.

"There is no 'casting off' about it, Mr. Stair; and as to the Church,
there is good ground for an appeal to Rome. The marriage as it stands
is little more than a formal betrothal, as you well know, sound enough
legally to make Mistress Margery my heir-at-law, mayhap, but still
lacking everything of--"

He could not wait to let me finish.

"Lacking, d'ye say?" he rapped out, wrathfully. "And whose fault is
that, ye cold-blooded stick? Tell me this; did I no bundle ye neck and
heels into your own wife's bed-room? And how do you thank me? I'm to
suppose ye quarrel wi' her like the dour-faced imp o' Sawtan that ye
are, and presently ye come raging out, swearing most shamefully at a man
old enough to be your father!"

'Twas far enough in the retrospect now so that I could smile at it. Yet
I would not suffer him to bluster me aside.

"It was an ill thing for you to do, none the less, Mr. Stair; the more
as you must have known that Mistress Margery's faith was plighted to
Richard Jennifer long before all this came to pass."

"Did I know it?" he shrilled. "That lang-legged jackanapes of a Dickie
Jennifer? Light o' love jade that she is, she never cared the snap of a
finger for him."

"You are talking far enough beside the mark now," I retorted. "Your
daughter loves Richard Jennifer well and truly; and with this
entanglement brushed aside she will marry him when he comes back from
the wars."

"She will, ye say? And what will become o' the braw acres of Appleby
that gait, I'd like to know? But ye're daft, man; clean daft. Didn't I
speir her giving him his quittance once for all that night when he rode
away after they had pitten ye to bed? She tell't him flat she loved
another man."

"Another man?" I echoed. "I--explain yourself, if you please, Mr. Stair.
What other man--"

He was at the door by this, and he broke out upon me in such a blast of
cursing as I hope never to hear from the lips of such an old man again.

"Ye cold-blooded, crusty devil!" he quavered, when all h