r the nobleman, and in a
soft voice broke into the most terrible torrent of bad language ever I
heard (and I've known cavaliers of fortune free that way). He called his
Marquis everything but a man.

"Then why in the name of God do you urge him on to a course that a fool
could read the poltroonery of? I never gave MacCailein Mor credit for
being a coward before," said I.

"Coward!" cried Splendid. "It's no cowardice but selfishness--the
disease, more or less, of us all. Do you think yon gentleman a coward?
Then you do not know the man. I saw him once, empty-handed, in the
forest, face the white stag and beat it off a hunter it was goring to
death, and they say he never blenched when the bonnet was shot off his
head at Drimtyne, but jested with a 'Close on't: a nail-breadth more,
and Colin was heir to an earlhood!'"

"I'm sorry to think the worst of an Argile and a Campbell, but surely
his place is here now."

"It is, I admit; and I egged him to follow his inclination because I'm
a fool in one thing, as you'll discover anon, because ifs easier and
pleasanter to convince a man to do what he wants to do than to convince
him the way he would avoid is the only right one."

"It's not an altogether nice quirk of the character," I said, drily. It
gave me something of a stroke to find so weak a bit in a man of so many
notable parts.

He spunked up like tinder.

"Do you call me a liar?" he said, with a face as white as a clout, his
nostrils stretching in his rage.

"Liar!" said I, "not I. It would be an ill time to do it with our common
enemy at the door. A lie (as I take it in my own Highland fashion) is
the untruth told for cowardice or to get a mean advantage of another:
your way with MacCailein was but a foolish way (also Highland, I've
noticed) of saving yourself the trouble of spurring up your manhood to
put him in the right."

"You do me less than half justice," said Splendid, the blood coming back
to his face, and him smiling again; "I allow I'm no preacher. If a
man must to hell, he must, his own gait. The only way I can get into
argument with him about the business is to fly in a fury. If I let my
temper up I would call MacCailein coward to his teeth, though I know
it's not his character. But I've been in a temper with my cousin before
now, and I ken the stuff he's made of: he gets as cold as steel the
hotter I get, and with the poorest of causes he could then put me in a
black confusion----"

"But you----