We were joined by the gipsy, a bold tall man with very black and lambent eyes, hiccoughing with drink but not by any means drunken, who took out a wallet and insisted on my joining now in his drink. I dare not refuse the courtesy. “Would you like your fortune spaed, sir?” asked my black friend, twitching his thumb in the direction of his wife, who was leering on me with a friendliness begot of the bottle. The place was full of deafening noises and peat-smoke. Fiddle jigged and pipes snored in the deep notes of debauchery, and the little Jew’s-trump twanged between the teeth of a dirty-faced man in a saffron shirt and hodden breeks, wanting jacket and hose--a wizen little old man, going around the world living like a poet in realms whereto trump and tipple could readily bring him. “Spae my fortune!” said I, laughing; “such swatches of the same as I had in the past were of no nature to make me eager to see what was to follow.” “Still and on,” said he, “who knows but you may find a wife and a good fortune in a little lurk of the thumb? Jean! Jean! woman,” he cried across the chamber to his callet, and over she came to a very indifferent and dubious client. I had got my hand read a score of times ere this (for I am of a nature curious and prying), and each time the reading was different, but it did not altogether shake my faith in wise women; so, half for the fun of it, I put some silver pieces in the loof of my hand and held it before the woman, the transaction unnoticed by the company. She gave the common harangue to start with. At last, “There’s a girl with a child,” said she. “Faith, and she never went to the well with the dish-clout then,” said the black man, using a well-known Gaelic proverb, meaning a compliment in his dirty assumption. “She’s in a place of many houses now,” went on the woman, busy upon the lines of my hand, “and her mind is taken up with a man in the ranks of Argile.” “That’s not reading the hand at all, goodwife,” said I; “those small facts of life are never written in a line across the loof.” “Jean is no apprentice at the trade,” said her man across her shoulder. “She can find a life’s history in the space of a hair.” “The man found the woman and the child under a root of fir,” said the woman, “and if the man is not very quick to follow her, he may find kinship’s courting get the better of a far-off lover’s fancy.” “_Dhè!_” said I; “you have your story most pat. And what now, would you say, would be the end of it all--coming to the real business of the palmist, which, I take it, is not to give past history but to forecast fate?” I’ll not deny but I was startled by the woman’s tale, for here was Betty and here was MacLachlan put before me as plainly as they were in my own mind day and night since we left Inneraora. The woman more closely scrutinised my hand, paused a while, and seemed surprised herself at its story. “After all,” said she, “the woman is not going to marry the man she loves.”