"It is your own life you are concerned about, Colonel MacKay," answered Claverhouse, with an evil smile full of contempt, and in the quietest of accents, for he had resumed his characteristic composure, "your own precious life, which you desire to keep in safeguard." Then, turning with a graceful gesture to some officers who had been passing and been arrested by the altercation, Claverhouse said with an air of careless languor: "May I have the strange privilege never given me before, and perhaps never to be mine again, of introducing you, by his leave or without it, to a Scot whom no one can deny is by birth a gentleman, and whom no one can deny now is also a coward--Lieutenant-Colonel MacKay, of the Prince's Scots Brigade."