“O, that I must be going out into the world alone with such a man!” she cried, and seemed to catch herself in with a great effort.  “But trouble yourself no more for that,” said she.  “He does not know what kind of nature is in my heart.  He will pay me dear for this day of it; dear, dear, will he pay.”

She turned, and began to go home and I to accompany her.  At which she stopped.

“I will be going alone,” she said.  “It is alone I must be seeing him.”

Some little while I raged about the streets, and told myself I was the worst used lad in Christendom.  Anger choked me; it was all very well for me to breathe deep; it seemed there was not air enough about Leyden to supply me, and I thought I would have burst like a man at the bottom of the sea.  I stopped and laughed at myself at a street corner a minute together, laughing out loud, so that a passenger looked at me, which brought me to myself.

“Well,” I thought, “I have been a gull and a ninny and a soft Tommy long enough.  Time it was done.  Here is a good lesson to have nothing to do with that accursed sex, that was the ruin of the man in the beginning and will be so to the end.  God knows I was happy enough before ever I saw her; God knows I can be happy enough again when I have seen the last of her.”

That seemed to me the chief affair:  to see them go.  I dwelled upon the idea fiercely; and presently slipped on, in a kind of malevolence, to consider how very poorly they were like to fare when Davie Balfour was no longer by to be their milk-cow; at which, to my own very great surprise, the disposition of my mind turned bottom up.  I was still angry; I still hated her; and yet I thought I owed it to myself that she should suffer nothing.

This carried me home again at once, where I found the mails drawn out and ready fastened by the door, and the father and daughter with every mark upon them of a recent disagreement.  Catriona was like a wooden doll; James More breathed hard, his face was dotted with white spots, and his nose upon one side.  As soon as I came in, the girl looked at him with a steady, clear, dark look that might very well have been followed by a blow.  It was a hint that was more contemptuous than a command, and I was surprised to see James More accept it.  It was plain he had had a master talking-to; and I could see there must be more of the devil in the girl than I had guessed, and more good-humor about the man than I had given him the credit of.

He began, at least, calling me Mr. Balfour, and plainly speaking from a lesson; but he got not very far, for at the first pompous swell of his voice, Catriona cut in.

“I will tell you what James More is meaning,” said she.  “He means we have come to you, beggar-folk, and have not behaved to you very well, and we are ashamed of our ingratitude and ill-behaviour.  Now we are wanting to go away and be forgotten; and my father will have guided his gear so ill, that we cannot even do that unless you will give us some more alms.  For that is what we are, at all events, beggar-folk and sorners.”