“I prayed for thee every day,” said Truelove simply,—­“for thee and for the sick man who had called thee to his side.  Let me see thy callimanco shoes.  Thee knows that I may not wear these others.”

The storekeeper brought the plainest footgear that his stock afforded.  “They are of a very small size,—­perhaps too small.  Had you not better try them ere you buy?  I could get a larger pair from Mr. Carter’s store.”

Truelove seated herself upon a convenient stool, and lifted her gray skirt an inch above a slender ankle.  “Perchance they may not be too small,” she said, and in despite of her training and the whiteness of her soul two dimples made their appearance above the corners of her pretty mouth.  MacLean knelt to remove the worn shoe, but found in the shoestrings an obstinate knot.  The two had the store to themselves; for Ephraim waited for his sister at the landing, rocking in his boat on the bosom of the river, watching a flight of wild geese drawn like a snowy streamer across the dark blue sky.  It was late autumn, and the forest was dressed in flame color.

“Thy fingers move so slowly that I fear thee is not well,” said Truelove kindly.  “They that have nursed men with fever do often fall ill themselves.  Will thee not see a physician?”

MacLean, sanguine enough in hue, and no more gaunt of body than usual, worked languidly on.  “I trust no lowland physician,” he said.  “In my own country, if I had need, I would send to the foot of Dun-da-gu for black Murdoch, whose fathers have been physicians to the MacLeans of Duart since the days of Galethus.  The little man in this parish,—­his father was a lawyer, his grandfather a merchant; he knows not what was his great-grandfather!  There, the shoe is untied!  If I came every day to your father’s house, and if your mother gave me to drink of her elder-flower wine, and if I might sit on the sunny doorstep and watch you at your spinning, I should, I think, recover.”

He slipped upon her foot the shoe of black cloth.  Truelove regarded it gravely. “’Tis not too small, after all,” she said.  “And does thee not think it more comely than these other, with their silly pomp of colored heels and blossoms woven in the silk?” She indicated with her glance the vainglorious row upon the bench beside her; then looked down at the little foot in its sombre covering and sighed.

“I think that thy foot would be fair in the shoe of Donald Ross!” cried the storekeeper, and kissed the member which he praised.

Truelove drew back, her cheeks very pink, and the dimples quite uncertain whether to go or stay.  “Thee is idle in thy behavior,” she said severely.  “I do think that thee is of the generation that will not learn.  I pray thee to expeditiously put back my own shoe, and to give me in a parcel the callimanco pair.”