kind gallows of Crief by small diversions among
cattle at night It's the least deserving that get the tow gravatte."

(Oh you liar! I thought.)

The woman's face looked puzzled. She thought a little, and said, "I
think you must be taking me up wrong; my man was never at the trade of
reiving, and----"

"I would never hint that he was, goodwife," cried John, quickly,
puzzled-looking himself. "I said I had a name for the thing; but they
were no friends of mine who gave me the credit, and I never stole stot
or quey in all my life."

(I have my doubts, thinks I.)

"My man died of the plague," said the woman, blurting out her news, as
if eager to get over an awkward business.

I have never seen such a sudden change in a person's aspect as came
over John Splendid in every feature. The vain trim man of a minute ago,
stroking his chin and showing a white hand (for the entertainment of the
woman he must always be forgetting was without her sight), balancing
and posturing on well-curved legs, and jauntily pinning his plaid on his
shoulder, in a flash lost backbone. He stepped a pace back, as if some
one had struck him a blow, his jaw fell, and his face grew ashen.

Then his eyes went darting about the chamber, and his nostrils sniffed
as if disease was a presence to be seen and scented, a thing tangible in
the air, maybe to be warded off by a sharp man's instruction in combat
of arms.

"God of grace!" he cried, crossing himself most vigorously for a person
of the Protestant religion, and muttering what I have no doubt was some
charm of his native glen for the prevention of fevers. He shut his mouth
thereafter very quickly on every phrase he uttered, breathing through
his nose; at the same time he kept himself, in every part but the
shoe-soles he tiptoed on, from touching anything. I could swear the open
air of the most unfriendly glen in Christendom was a possession to be
envious of for John M'Iver of Barbreck.

Stewart heard the woman's news that came to him as he was carrying in
from the byre the vessels from which he had been serving his companions.
He was in a stew more extraordinary than John Splendid; he blanched even
to the scars of his half-head, as we say, spat vehemently out of his
mouth a piece of bread he was chewing, turned round about in a flash,
and into the byre past me as I stood (not altogether alarmed, but yet a
little disturbed and uneasy) in the doorway. He emptied his clothing and
knapsack of ever