e beginnin' o' the unfortunate
acquaintance."

The marriage between the two was acknowledged to the world in
1787.--EDITOR.

CHAPTER XIX

THE QUARREL BETWEEN DANVERS AND NANCY

We were back at Stair for nearly a fortnight, with Nancy quite herself
again, before she took me into her confidence regarding the Burns
experience. Leaning against the wall by the stair-foot with her hands
behind her, a way she'd had ever since she was a wee bit, the talk
began, with no leading up to it on either side.

"Jock," she said, suddenly, and a quaint look came over her face, "I've
never told you what made me ill at Mauchline."

"I've been waiting," I answered.

"It was a bad time for me," she continued.

"I know that, Lady-bird," said I.

"Part of me died," she said, and on this a thought flashed by me which,
I have often held, that in some way her language expressed more than
she knew.

"I've been filled up with conceit of myself," she went on, "and I got
punished for it."

"There was never a woman living with less!" I cried, so sodden in my
affection for her that I could not stand to hear her blamed, even by
herself.

"Maybe I didn't show it," she said with a smile, "but I've always held,
'in to mysel',' that the gifted folk were God's aristocrats, and the
day I told Danvers Carmichael and you my esteem of lords and titles and
forbears I said just what I thought, though both of you laughed at me,
for I reasoned that any one whom the Almighty took such special pains
with must have the grand character as well. And so I made of all the
people who write and paint and sing a great assembly, like Arthur's
knights, who were over the earth righting wrongs and helping the weak.
Then came the Burns book; and there are no words to tell the glory of
it to me. All the great thoughts I had dreamed were written there, and
before the power of this man, who took the commonest things of life and
wrote them out in letters of gold, I felt as one might before the gods.
It was of Burns I thought in my waking hours, and 'twas of him I
dreamed by night; and I thanked God to be born in his country and his
time, so that I might see one, from the people, who had, in its highest
essence, the thing we call genius.

"But always, always," she interrupted, smiling, "with the conceit of
myself which I mentioned before. Because God had given me a little
gift, I believed that I was in some degree a chosen creature, a bit
li