John Johnstone gave a little impatient stamp of the foot.

It seemed to Betty watching them, that thus he gave a mute answer to some mute question or entreaty made.

“Sit down, sit down, my pretty lady,” said Rachel drawing forward and dusting a chair.  “You are welcome as flowers in May, or as the first swallow that heralds the spring.  Are you well, my bonnie dear? and the good gentleman your father?”

“We are all well, dame.  I am ashamed not to have been to see you for so long, but I am glad that you have had other visitors,” and she glanced at Mr. Johnstone.

“We are old friends,” he said with a smile of rare sweetness.  “One of my most faithful servants and friends was my foster-brother Harry Ray, Rachel’s eldest son.”

“Aye, aye, was!” cried the woman, her voice rising to a kind of wail.”  We speak of Hal Ray in the past now.”

Johnstone bit his lip, and a bitter frown contracted his brow.

“Alas, is he dead, dame?” asked Betty tenderly.

“Aye, dear heart, dead, and his bones have no grave, and happen his spirit no rest.”

“This is terrible,” said Betty with a shiver.

Mr. Johnstone moved restlessly to the window, and busied himself with his sword-knot.

“I have often told you, good mother,” he said, and his voice had in it an odd mixture of grief and irritation, “that the less we dwell on these things the better.  Mistress Betty,” he went on hurriedly, “Harry Ray when he left my service, joined his fortunes with Wild Jack Barnstaple.  He had ill-luck, poor lad, he was taken and ... and hanged.”

His mother uttered a shuddering cry.

“And by the road he must hang,” she cried, “till the earth and the wild winds have done their worst, and never a one to scare the wild birds from the flesh of my boy!”

“Dear dame,” said Betty earnestly, “the soul recks little of its earthly tenement.”

“God rest his soul, he was a good fellow and brave,” said Johnstone earnestly.

“I also have seen Wild Jack,” said Betty, willing to turn the poor woman from her troubles.

“Seen him! seen Wild Jack?” cried she.

“Aye, seen him and been his prisoner; and say who will to the contrary, I have reason to maintain that he is a true gentleman.”

“Is it so?” said Mr. Johnstone, smiling.  “A cut-throat, a robber, a highwayman, a true gentleman?”

Betty gave him an indignant glance.  “I speak of him as I found him,” she said.  “And we of the country have always known how to distinguish between common malefactors and the gentlemen of the road.”

“So, so!” answered Johnstone, still smiling.  “And yet both end too often on Tyburn Hill.”

Betty turned pale and shivered.  It seemed as if she gasped for breath; she turned her large eyes on her lover and said, “Ah, these matters are far too serious for so grim a jest.”