ou been always as abstinent, you would
have escaped the deadly hatred of your cousin Rashleigh."

"Had I been always prudent," said I, blushing at the scene he recalled to
my recollection, "I should have escaped a worse evil--the reproach of my
own conscience."

MacGregor cast a keen and somewhat fierce glance on me, as if to read
whether the reproof, which he evidently felt, had been intentionally
conveyed. He saw that I was thinking of myself, not of him, and turned
his face towards the fire with a deep sigh. I followed his example, and
each remained for a few minutes wrapt in his own painful reverie. All in
the hut were now asleep, or at least silent, excepting ourselves.

MacGregor first broke silence, in the tone of one who takes up his
determination to enter on a painful subject. "My cousin Nicol Jarvie
means well," he said, "but he presses ower hard on the temper and
situation of a man like me, considering what I have been--what I have
been forced to become--and, above all, that which has forced me to become
what I am."

He paused; and, though feeling the delicate nature of the discussion in
which the conversation was likely to engage me, I could not help
replying, that I did not doubt his present situation had much which must
be most unpleasant to his feelings.

"I should be happy to learn," I added, "that there is an honourable
chance of your escaping from it."

"You speak like a boy," returned MacGregor, in a low tone that growled
like distant thunder--"like a boy, who thinks the auld gnarled oak can be
twisted as easily as the young sapling. Can I forget that I have been
branded as an outlaw--stigmatised as a traitor--a price set on my head as
if I had been a wolf--my family treated as the dam and cubs of the
hill-fox, whom all may torment, vilify, degrade, and insult--the very
name which came to me from a long and noble line of martial ancestors,
denounced, as if it were a spell to conjure up the devil with?"

As he went on in this manner, I could plainly see, that, by the
enumeration of his wrongs, he was lashing himself up into a rage, in
order to justify in his own eyes the errors they had led him into. In
this he perfectly succeeded; his light grey eyes contracting alternately
and dilating their pupils, until they seemed actually to flash with
flame, while he thrust forward and drew back his foot, grasped the hilt
of his dirk, extended his arm, clenched his fist, and finally rose from
his seat.