On the way home, as soon as I was set free, I upbraided Miss Grant with her cruelty.

“I am sorry you was disappointed,” says she demurely.  “For my part I was very pleased.  You looked better than I dreaded; you looked—­if it will not make you vain—­a mighty pretty young man when you appeared in the window.  You are to remember that she could not see your feet,” says she, with the manner of one reassuring me.

“O!” cried I, “leave my feet be, they are no bigger than my neighbor’s.”

“They are even smaller than some,” said she, “but I speak in parables like a Hebrew prophet.”

“I marvel little they were sometimes stoned!” says I.  “But you miserable girl, how could you do it?  Why should you care to tantalise me with a moment?”

“Love is like folk,” says she, “it needs some kind of vivers."[22]

“O, Barbara, let me see her properly!” I pleaded. “You can, you see her when you please; let me have half an hour.”

“Who is it that is managing this love affair?  You?  Or me?” she asked, and as I continued to press her with my instances, fell back upon a deadly expedient:  that of imitating the tones of my voice when I called on Catriona by name; with which, indeed, she held me in subjection for some days to follow.

There was never the least word heard of the memorial, or none by me.  Prestongrange and his grace the Lord President may have heard of it (for what I know) on the deafest sides of their heads; they kept it to themselves, at least; the public was none the wiser; and in course of time, on November 8th, and in the midst of a prodigious storm of wind and rain, poor James of the Glens was duly hanged at Lettermore by Balachulish.

So there was the final upshot of my politics!  Innocent men have perished before James, and are like to keep on perishing (in spite of all our wisdom) till the end of time.  And till the end of time, young folk (who are not yet used with the duplicity of life and men) will struggle as I did, and make heroical resolves, and take long risks; and the course of events will push them upon the one side and go on like a marching army.  James was hanged; and here was I dwelling in the house of Prestongrange, and grateful to him for his fatherly attention.  He was hanged; and behold!  When I met Mr. Symon in the causeway, I was fain to pull off my beaver to him like a good little boy before his dominie.  He had been hanged by fraud and violence, and the world wagged along, and there was not a pennyweight of difference; and the villains of that horrid plot were decent, kind, respectable fathers of families, who went to kirk and took the sacrament!

But I had had my view of that detestable business they call politics—­I had seen it from behind, when it is all bones and blackness; and I was cured for life of any temptations to take part in it again.  A plain, quiet, private path was that which I was ambitious to walk in, when I might keep my head out of the way of dangers and my conscience out of the road of temptation.  For, upon a retrospect, it appeared I had not done so grandly, after all; but with the greatest possible amount of big speech and preparation, had accomplished nothing.