What!--dislike your own
mother?"
"Dinna say the word, my leddy," cried Malcolm in a tone of agony,
"or ye'll gar me skirl an' rin like the mad laird. He's no a hair
madder nor I wad be wi' sic a mither."
He would have passed her to leave the room.
But Lady Florimel could not bear defeat. In any contest she must
win or be shamed in her own eyes, and was she to gain absolutely
nothing in such a passage with a fisher lad? Was the billow of her
persuasion to fall back from such a rock, self beaten into poorest
foam? She would, she must subdue him! Perhaps she did not know how
much the sides of her intent were pricked by the nettling discovery
that she was not the cause of his unhappiness.
"You 're not going to leave me so!" she exclaimed, in a tone of
injury.
"I 'll gang or bide as ye wull, my leddy," answered Malcolm
resignedly.
"Bide then," she returned. "I haven't half done with you yet."
"Ye mauna jist tear my hert oot," he rejoined--with a sad half
smile, and another of his dog-like looks.
"That's what you would do to your mother!" said Florimel severely.
"Say nae ill o' my mither!" cried Malcolm, suddenly changing almost
to fierceness.
"Why, Malcolm!" said Florimel, bewildered, "what ill was I saying
of her?"
"It's naething less than an insult to my mither to ca' yon wuman
by her name," he replied with set teeth.
It was to him an offence against the idea of motherhood--against
the mother he had so often imagined luminous against the dull blank
of memory, to call such a woman his mother.
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