Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 150.djvu/358

fond of showing off before strangers. As for Joan, everybody knew her to be true as steel, and I could answer for my friend being the very soul of honour.

I thought this would mend the rift, but I am not sure it did not widen it.

“Any way, mister,” he replied, gloomily, “it will be a very strange thing that Mr Burgon has taken half-a-dozen sketches of her—ay, and more—unbeknown to me, and yet she was neffer for having the photograph taken, neffer! See you now! There she stands brazening it out with him at the door! That will be a strange thing too, whateffer!”

“Pooh! That is just because she knows you are watching her. That’s the way with them. Man alive! can’t you see that if she did not care for you, she would not be taking her fun off you?”

“Fun!” he cried, scornfully; “and you think it will be right that she should be taking her fun off me before strangers. That will be what she would be doing the now. I ask you, mister, how you would like it?”

“You must not call us strangers, Angus.”

“It is the stranger that has come petween us,” he droned on mournfully, without heeding my words. “Neffer pefore has it happened. The gentlemen have been here to shoot and to stalk, and she neffer had a word for them. Nefter before has the stranger come between us, and now—”

All this time he had never once taken his eyes off the inn door; and just then as Burgon and Joan disappeared inside, he stopped abruptly and strode down after them.

Joan opened fire the moment we got into the bar parlour. Something that Angus had said to her before he took refuge on the hill was evidently rankling in her breast—for a more wilful, perverse, irritating young person than Miss Joan was then, could not have been found in her Majesty's dominions. Purposely ignoring Angus’s presence, she laughed and giggled and rattled on how she would dress as the real Darthula, and be taken on the mountain-side with a dirk in her hand. Would Mr Burgon not like to make another sketch of her then and there by the window with the sunlight flickering in?

What the little minx could do to irritate and drive Angus mad with jealousy she did; and when at last he interposed by saying gruffly they had had enough of picture-making, she at once resented his assumption of proprietorship by turning on him like a tigress, and saying with a fine gesture of disdain—

“Look you to yourself, Mister Maclean, and I will look to myself!”

“I've a mind to be taking you at your word, my lass!” said he, jumping up and turning pale.

“Go your ways and don’t ‘my lass’ me,” she retorted, just as red as he was white.

Angus bounced out.

“Don’t be a fool!” said I, following him.

“The stranger has come between us, and let that stranger look to hisself;” and with this he clapped on his bonnet and marched off to Inveroran.

This was by no means the end of the rumpus. When I returned, Miss Joan was engaged tooth and nail with her uncle—so fiercely, too, that Burgon and I beat a hasty retreat. Half an hour later the battle finished by the cart drawing up at the door, and Miss Joan, still defiant, being driven off with her