The laugh which followed this found Burns at her side, every passion in his inflammable nature alight.
"Aye," he cried, "ye have the verse makin'. But the e's are easy. Why didn't ye try the Doon. 'Tis as celebrate."
"Sure," she answered, "there are rhymes begging for that. Tune, soon, rune, June----"
"And loon," Burns threw in, daffing with her. "Ye wouldn't be forgetting that."
"It was not my intention to be leaving the author of the piece out of it," she threw back at him, laughing, at which Burns gave her a look.
"You'd better mend your manners," he cried, gaily, "or some day I'll take my pen in hand to you, and _then_, may the Lord have mercy on your soul!" adding low, "_Mistress Nancy Stair!_"
Some consternation followed upon this, for it was unknown by any of them that he had seen Nancy in Edinbro', and after the talk was readjusted a bit to the news, the five of them, with Mrs. Todd listening on the other side of the door, sat till hard upon one o'clock, with uplifted minds, insensible to time or weather.
The extreme disorder caused by the wind, for the storm had risen, at length recalled them to themselves, and Mrs. Todd, who worshiped the great poet, came in.
"You must lie here to-night, Mr. Burns," she said hospitably; and as the poet lighted Nancy up the stair:
"Good night," he cried, "good night!" and then, because there was a devil in the man whenever he looked at a pretty woman, "I'll have no sleep to-night. I'm in some far-up region where poems are made and where all the women are like you!"
For three days the horrid weather kept them housebound; three days in which Nancy and Robert Burns lived in dangerous nearness to each other, considering her youth, her temperament, and the passion of admiration which she held for him; three days of poetry and folk-tales and ballad-singing, with the man's dangerous magnetism at work between them.
It was on the afternoon of this third day that a girl passed the window near which Burns sat, and beckoning to him, he slammed out into the storm, with no prefacing word to his act whatever, leaving Nancy staring after him in amazement, as she said to Mr. Hamilton:
"Do you not think his manners are strange?"
"The Edinburgh people say that he had them straight from his Maker," Mr. Hamilton answered, evading an opinion of his own.