“For ten years and more you have been my—­master,” said the storekeeper.  “It is a word for which I have an invincible distaste.  It is not well—­having neither love nor friendship to put in its place—­to let hatred die.  When I came first to this slavery, I hated all Campbells, all Whigs, Forster that betrayed us at Preston, and Ewin Mor Mackinnon.  But the years have come and the years have gone, and I am older than I was at twenty-five.  The Campbells I can never reach:  they walk secure, overseas, through Lorn and Argyle, couching in the tall heather above Etive, tracking the red deer in the Forest of Dalness.  Forster is dead.  Ewin Mackinnon is dead, I know; for five years ago come Martinmas night I saw his perjured soul on its way to hell.  All the world is turning Whig.  A man may hate the world, it is true, but he needs a single foe.”

“And in that capacity you have adopted me?” demanded Haward.

MacLean let his gaze travel over the man opposite him, from the looped hat and the face between the waves of hair to the gilt spurs upon the great boots; then turned his eyes upon his own hand and coarsely clad arm stretched across the cask.  “I, too, am a gentleman, the brother of a chieftain,” he declared.  “I am not without schooling.  I have seen something of life, and of countries more polite than the land where I was born, though not so dear.  I have been free, and have loved my freedom.  Do you find it so strange that I should hate you?”

There was a silence; then, “Upon my soul, I do not know that I do,” said Haward slowly.  “And yet, until this day I did not know of your existence.”

“But I knew of yours,” answered the storekeeper.  “Your agent hath an annoying trick of speech, and the overseers have caught it from him.  ’Your master’ this, and ‘your master’ that; in short, for ten years it hath been, ‘Work, you dog, that your master may play!’ Well, I have worked; it was that, or killing myself, or going mad.  I have worked for you in the fields, in the smithy, in this close room.  But when you bought my body, you could not buy my soul.  Day after day, and night after night, I sent it away; I would not let it bide in these dull levels, in this cursed land of heat and stagnant waters.  At first it went home to its own country,—­to its friends and its foes, to the torrent and the mountain and the music of the pipes; but at last the pain outweighed the pleasure, and I sent it there no more.  And then it began to follow you.”

“To follow me!” involuntarily exclaimed Haward.

“I have been in London,” went on the other, without heeding the interruption.  “I know the life of men of quality, and where they most resort.  I early learned from your other servants, and from the chance words of those who had your affairs in charge, that you were young, well-looking, a man of pleasure.  At first when I thought of you the blood came into my cheek, but at last I thought of you constantly,