I should trifle with my conscience if I pretended my stay upon the Bass was wholly disagreeable.  It seemed to me a safe place, as though I was escaped there out of my troubles.  No harm was to be offered me; a material impossibility, rock and the deep sea, prevented me from fresh attempts; I felt I had my life safe and my honour safe, and there were times when I allowed myself to gloat on them like stolen waters.  At other times my thoughts were very different.  I recalled how strong I had expressed myself both to Rankeillor and to Stewart; I reflected that my captivity upon the Bass, in view of a great part of the coasts of Fife and Lothian, was a thing I should be thought more likely to have invented than endured; and in the eyes of these two gentlemen, at least, I must pass for a boaster and a coward.  Now I would take this lightly enough; tell myself that so long as I stood well with Catriona Drummond, the opinion of the rest of man was but moonshine and spilled water; and thence pass off into those meditations of a lover which are so delightful to himself and must always appear so surprisingly idle to a reader.  But anon the fear would take me otherwise; I would be shaken with a perfect panic of self-esteem, and these supposed hard judgments appear an injustice impossible to be supported.  With that another train of thought would be presented, and I had scarce begun to be concerned about men’s judgments of myself, than I was haunted with the remembrance of James Stewart in his dungeon and the lamentations of his wife.  Then, indeed, passion began to work in me; I could not forgive myself to sit there idle; it seemed (if I were a man at all) that I could fly or swim out of my place of safety; and it was in such humours and to amuse my self-reproaches that I would set the more particularly to win the good side of Andie Dale.

At last, when we two were alone on the summit of the rock on a bright morning, I put in some hint about a bribe.  He looked at me, cast back his head, and laughed out loud.

“Ay, you’re funny, Mr. Dale,” said I, “but perhaps if you glance an eye upon that paper you may change your note.”

The stupid Highlanders had taken from me at the time of my seizure nothing but hard money, and the paper I now showed Andie was an acknowledgment from the British Linen Company for a considerable sum.

He read it.  “Troth, and ye’re nane sae ill aff,” said he.

“I thought that would maybe vary your opinions,” said I.

“Hout!” said he.  “It shaws me ye can bribe; but I’m no to be bribit.”

“We’ll see about that yet a while,” says I.  “And first, I’ll show you that I know what I am talking.  You have orders to detain me here till Thursday, 21st September.”

“Ye’re no a’thegether wrong either,” says Andie.  “I’m to let ye gang, bar orders contrair, on Saturday, the 23rd.”

I could not but feel there was something extremely insidious in this arrangement.  That I was to reappear precisely in time to be too late would cast the more discredit on my tale, if I were minded to tell one; and this screwed me to fighting point.