clear, disengaged myself, and paced to and fro before her, in the manner of what we call a smuggler’s walk, belabouring my brains for any remedy.  By the course of these scattering thoughts I was brought suddenly face to face with a remembrance that, in the heat and haste of our departure, I had left Captain Sang to pay the ordinary.  At this I began to laugh out loud, for I thought the man well served; and at the same time, by an instinctive movement, carried my hand to the pocket where my money was.  I suppose it was in the lane where the women jostled us; but there is only the one thing certain, that my purse was gone.

“You will have thought of something good,” said she, observing me to pause.

At the pinch we were in, my mind became suddenly clear as a perspective glass, and I saw there was no choice of methods.  I had not one doit of coin, but in my pocket-book I had still my letter on the Leyden merchant; and there was now but the one way to get to Leyden, and that was to walk on our two feet.

“Catriona,” said I, “I know you’re brave and I believe you’re strong, do you think you could walk thirty miles on a plain road?” We found it, I believe, scarce the two-thirds of that, but such was my notion of the distance.

“David,” she said, “if you will just keep near, I will go anywhere and do anything.  The courage of my heart, it is all broken.  Do not be leaving me in this horrible country by myself, and I will do all else.”

“Can you start now and march all night?” said I.

“I will do all that you can ask of me,” she said, “and never ask you why.  I have been a bad ungrateful girl to you; and do what you please with me now!  And I think Miss Barbara Grant is the best lady in the world,” she added, “and I do not see what she would deny you for at all events.”

This was Greek and Hebrew to me; but I had other matters to consider, and the first of these was to get clear of that city on the Leyden road.  It proved a cruel problem; and it may have been one or two at night ere we had solved it.  Once beyond the houses, there was neither moon or stars to guide us; only the whiteness of the way in the midst and a blackness of an alley on both hands.  The walking was besides made most extraordinary difficult by a plain black frost that fell suddenly in the small hours and turned that highway into one long slide.

“Well, Catriona,” said I, “here we are like the king’s sons and the old wives’ daughters in your daft-like Highland tales.  Soon we’ll be going over the ‘seven Bens, the seven glens, and the seven mountain moors.’” Which was a common byword or overcome in these tales of hers that had stuck in my memory.

“Ah,” says she, “but here are no glens or mountains!  Though I will never be denying but what the trees and some of the plain places hereabouts are very pretty.  But our country is the best yet.”

“I wish we could say as much for our own folk,” says I, recalling Sprott and Sang, and perhaps James More himself.