what the thing threatened amounted to. He
had had few hard blows in his time, and had never felt a whip.

"Ye deil's glaur!" cried the fellow, clenching the cruel teeth of
one who loved not his brother, "I s' lat ye ken what comes o'
brakin' into honest hooses, an' takin' what's no yer ain!"

A vision of the gnawed cheese, which he had never touched since the
idea of its being property awoke in him, rose before Gibbie's mental
eyes, and inwardly he bowed to the punishment. But the look he had
fixed on Angus was not without effect, for the man was a father,
though a severe one, and was not all a brute: he turned and changed
the cart whip for a gig one with a broken shaft, which lay near. It
was well for himself that he did so, for the other would probably
have killed Gibbie. When the blow fell the child shivered all over,
his face turned white, and without uttering even a moan, he doubled
up and dropped senseless. A swollen cincture, like a red snake, had
risen all round his waist, and from one spot in it the blood was
oozing. It looked as if the lash had cut him in two.

The blow had stung his heart and it had ceased to beat. But the
gamekeeper understood vagrants! the young blackguard was only
shamming!

"Up wi' ye, ye deevil! or I s' gar ye," he said from between his
teeth, lifting the whip for a second blow.

Just as the stroke fell, marking him from the nape all down the
spine, so that he now bore upon his back in red the sign the ass
carries in black, a piercing shriek assailed Angus's ears, and his
arm, which had mechanically raised itself for a third blow, hung
arrested.

The same moment, in at the coach-house door shot Ginevra, as white
as Gibbie. She darted to where he lay, and there stood over him,
arms rigid and hands clenched hard, shivering as he had shivered,
and sending from her body shriek after shriek, as if her very soul
were the breath of which her cries were fashioned. It was as if the
woman's heart in her felt its roots torn from their home in the
bosom of God, and quivering in agony, and confronted by the stare of
an eternal impossibility, shrieked against Satan.

"Gang awa, missie," cried Angus, who had respect to this child,
though he had not yet learned to respect childhood; "he's a coorse
cratur, an' maun hae's whups."

But Ginevra was deaf to his evil charming. She stopped her cries,
however, to help Gibbie up, and took one of his hands to raise him.
But his arm hung l