“Do you know what makes me smile?” said she.  “Well, it is this.  I am made this way, that I should have been a man child.  In my own thoughts it is so I am always; and I go on telling myself about this thing that is to befall and that.  Then it comes to the place of the fighting, and it comes over me that I am only a girl at all events, and cannot hold a sword or give one good blow; and then I have to twist my story round about, so that the fighting is to stop, and yet me have the best of it, just like you and the lieutenant; and I am the boy that makes the fine speeches all through, like Mr. David Balfour.”

“You are a bloodthirsty maid,” said I.

“Well, I know it is good to sew and spin, and to make samplers,” she said, “but if you were to do nothing else in the great world, I think you will say yourself it is a driech business; and it is not that I want to kill, I think.  Did ever you kill anyone?”

“That I have, as it chances.  Two, no less, and me still a lad that should be at the college,” said I.  “But yet, in the look-back, I take no shame for it.”

“But how did you feel, then—­after it?” she asked.

“’Deed, I sat down and grat like a bairn,” said I.

“I know that, too,” she cried.  “I feel where these tears should come from.  And at any rate, I would not wish to kill, only to be Catherine Douglas that put her arm through the staples of the bolt, where it was broken.  That is my chief hero.  Would you not love to die so—­for your king?” she asked.

“Troth,” said I, “my affection for my king, God bless the puggy face of him, is under more control; and I thought I saw death so near to me this day already, that I am rather taken up with the notion of living.”

“Right,” she said, “the right mind of a man!  Only you must learn arms; I would not like to have a friend that cannot strike.  But it will not have been with the sword that you killed these two?”

“Indeed, no,” said I, “but with a pair of pistols.  And a fortunate thing it was the men were so near-hand to me, for I am about as clever with the pistols as I am with the sword.”

So then she drew from me the story of our battle in the brig, which I had omitted in my first account of my affairs.

“Yes,” said she, “you are brave.  And your friend, I admire and love him.”

“Well, and I think any one would!” said I.  “He has his faults like other folk; but he is brave and staunch and kind, God bless him!  That will be a strange day when I forget Alan.”  And the thought of him, and that it was within my choice to speak with him that night, had almost overcome me.

“And where will my head be gone that I have not told my news!” she cried, and spoke of a letter from her father, bearing that she might visit him to-morrow in the castle whither he was now transferred, and that his affairs were mending.  “You do not like to hear it,” said she.  “Will you judge my father and not know him?”