“No,” Babbie said, “you don’t understand what it is.  Ah!  I did not mean to hurt you.”

“If I don’t know what it is, what is it?” he asked, almost humbly.  “I scarcely know you now.”

“That is it,” said Babbie.

She gave him back his ring, and then he broke down pitifully.  Doubtless there was good in him, but I saw him only once; and with nothing to contrast against it, I may not now attempt to breathe life into the dust of his senile passion.  These were the last words that passed between him and Babbie: 

“There was nothing,” he said wistfully, “in this wide world that you could not have had by asking me for it.  Was not that love?”

“No,” she answered.  “What right have I to everything I cry for?”

“You should never have had a care had you married me.  That is love.”

“It is not.  I want to share my husband’s cares, as I expect him to share mine.”

“I would have humored you in everything.”

“You always did:  as if a woman’s mind were for laughing at, like a baby’s passions.”

“You had your passions, too, Babbie.  Yet did I ever chide you for them?  That was love.”

“No, it was contempt.  Oh,” she cried passionately, “what have not you men to answer for who talk of love to a woman when her face is all you know of her; and her passions, her aspirations, are for kissing to sleep, her very soul a plaything?  I tell you, Lord Rintoul, and it is all the message I send back to the gentlemen at the Spittal who made love to me behind your back, that this is a poor folly, and well calculated to rouse the wrath of God.”

Now, Jean’s ear had been to the parlor keyhole for a time, but some message she had to take to Margaret, and what she risked saying was this: 

“It’s Lord Rintoul and a party that has been catched in the rain, and he would be obliged to you if you could gie his bride shelter for the nicht.”

Thus the distracted servant thought to keep Margaret’s mind at rest until Gavin came back.

“Lord Rintoul!” exclaimed Margaret.  “What a pity Gavin has missed him.  Of course she can stay here.  Did you say I bad gone to bed?  I should not know What to say to a lord.  But ask her to come up to me after he has gone—­and, Jean, is the parlor looking tidy?”

Lord Rintoul having departed, Jean told Babbie how she had accounted to Margaret for his visit.  “And she telled me to gie you dry claethes and her compliments, and would you gang up to the bedroom and see her?”

Very slowly Babbie climbed the stairs.  I suppose she is the only person who was ever afraid of Margaret.  Her first knock on the bedroom door was so soft that Margaret, who was sitting up in bed, did not hear it.  When Babbie entered the room, Margaret’s first thought was that there could be no other so beautiful as this, and her second was that the stranger seemed even more timid than herself.  After a few minutes’ talk she laid aside her primness, a weapon she had drawn in self-defence lest this fine lady should not understand the grandeur of a manse, and at a “Call me Babbie, won’t you?” she smiled.