“I’m not tired,” Lily told her, but Jean seemed to take no notice.

With a faint frown, Jean said to the corporal, “I’ve half a mind to bring her home again to live with us. The work’s too hard for one so young. What do you think?”

Corporal Morison looked steadily at Lily, who looked back at him. He said, “I think the lass kens her own mind.”

Lily decided that she liked him very much.

He said, “I did nearly forget, I have good news to tell ye. We captured your thieves in the small hours this morning. Two men and a lad, in the same clothes your housemaid described to our guardsmen, who caught them conducting their business in Hamilton’s Close.”

Jean thought it good news indeed. “It will be difficult for them to do their business from the Tolbooth.”

Corporal Morison agreed. “And still more difficult, I reckon, from the gallows.”

Lily frowned. She knew it was important to keep order in a town, and she had often heard her father say that laws and justice were things worth defending; but in her heart she could not help but feel that in her father’s case, justice had not been fair, which meant that not all men who lost their lives because of it deserved it.

She asked, “Will all of them be hanged?”

The corporal seemed surprised by both her frown and tone of voice. “Ye don’t agree they should be punished for their crimes?”

She said, “Not all of them the same. The lad was different.”

Corporal Morison asked, “How?”

“He did not let them in. The men who sent him through the window,” Lily said. “He did not let them in.”

“Because Nanse chased him off,” Jean reasoned.

Lily shook her head. “Nanse was asleep. There was no one but me, and I was too feart to do anything. He could have let the others in, but he chose not to. And he told them he’d heard someone in the next room, but that was not true. I do believe,” she said, because she’d had time now to turn this over in her mind, “that when he realized Nanse and I were there alone he wished no harm to come to us, and that is why he did not let them in.”

“And I believe,” said Jean, “that ye do have a soft heart that would seek to see the best in everyone. I fear that it will one day lead ye into trouble.”

Lily could not see how it would do so, but Corporal Morison had already come to her defense.

“There’s nothing wrong with a soft heart,” he said to Jean. “Mine’s always served me well.”

Jean rolled her eyes. “That same soft heart that made ye tell me her downstairs looked lonely, and I ought to ask her up to dinner?”

“Aye, well, she does look fair lonely, sometimes.”

“Whores don’t want for company,” Jean told him. “But they can’t have mine.”