“Your pardon, goodwife,” said he, “but I see you are too sharp for my small deceit I daresay I might have guessed there was no child ill; but for reasons of my own I’m anxious to leave a little money with you till I come back this road again. We trusted you with our lives for a couple of hours there, and surely, thinks I, we can trust you with a couple of yellow pieces.” The woman stopped her wheel and resumed her good-humour. “I thought,” said she,--“I thought you meant payment for----” “You’re a bit hard on my manners, goodwife,” said John. “Of course I have been a soldier, and might have done the trick of paying forage with a sergeant’s blunt-ness, but I think I know a Gaelic woman’s spirit better.” “But are you likely to be passing here again at any time?” cried the woman, doubt again darkening her face, and by this time she had the money in her hand. “I thought you were going back by the Glen?” “That was our notion,” said my comrade, marvellously ready, “but to tell the truth we are curious to see this Keppoch bard, whose songs we know very well in real Argile, and we take a bit of the road to Kilcumin after him.” The weakness of this tale was not apparent to the woman, who I daresay had no practice of such trickery as my friend was the master of, and she put the money carefully in a napkin and in a recess beneath one of the roof-joists. Our thanks she took carelessly, no doubt, because we were Campbells. I was starting on the way to Inverlochy when M’Iver protested we must certainly go a bit of the way to Kilcumin. “I’m far from sure,” said he, “that that very particular bit of MacDonald woman is quite confident of the truth of my story. At any rate, she’s no woman if she’s not turning it over in her mind by now, and she’ll be out to look the road we take before very long or I’m mistaken.” We turned up the Kilcumin road, which soon led us out of sight of the hut, and, as my friend said, a glance behind us showed us the woman in our rear, looking after us. “Well, there’s no turning so long as she’s there,” said I. “I wish your generosity had shown itself in a manner more convenient for us. There’s another example of the error of your polite and truthless tongue! When you knew the woman was not wanting the money, you should have put it in your sporran again, and----” “Man, Elrigmore,” he cried, “you have surely studied me poorly if you would think me the man to insult the woman--and show my own stupidity at the same time--by exposing my strategy when a bit fancy tale and a short daunder on a pleasant morning would save the feelings of both the lady and myself.” “You go through life on a zigzag,” I protested, “aiming for some goal that another would cut straight across for, making deviations of an hour to save you a second’s unpleasantness. I wish I could show you the diplomacy of straightforwardness: the honest word, though hard to say sometimes, is a man’s duty as much as the honest deed of hand.”