“I’ve had my chance of common life, city and town, and the company of ladies with broidery and camisole and washen faces,” he answered with no hesitation, “and give me the highroad and freedom and the very brute of simplicity. I’m not of these parts. I’m not of the Highlands at all, as you may guess, though I’ve been in them and through them for many a day. I see you’re still vexed about my woman’s reading of your palm. It seems to have fitted in with some of your experience.” I confessed her knowledge of my private affairs surprised me, and his black eyes twinkled with humour. “I’ll explain the puzzle for just as much money as you gave her,” said he, “and leave you more satisfied at the end than she did. And there’s no black art at the bottom of my skill either.” “Very well,” said I; “here’s your drink-money; now tell me the trick of it, for trick I suppose it is.” He pocketed the money after a vagabond’s spit on the coin for luck, and in twenty words exposed his by-love’s device. They had just come from Inneraora two or three days before, and the tale of the Provost’s daughter in Strongara had been the talk of the town. “But how did your wife guess the interest of the lady in a man of Argile’s army?” I asked. “Because she spaed the lady’s fortune too,” he answered, “and she had to find out in the neighbourhood what it was like to be before she did so; you know that is half the art of the thing.” “Yet your woman’s guess that I was the man--that’s beyond me!” “I was struck myself when she out with that,” he confessed. “Oh, she’s a deep one, Jean! But your manner and tongue betrayed the returned soldier of fortune; of such officers in the ranks of Argile there are not so many that it was risking too much to believe all of them knew the story of the Provost’s daughter, and your conduct, once she got that length, did the rest.” “And about kinship’s courting?” I asked, amazed at the simplicity of the thing. The man dashed his fee on the board and ordered more liquor. “Drink up,” said he, “and drown care if you’re the man my good-wife thought you, for faith there’s a little fellow from over the loch making himself very snug in the lady’s company in your absence.” There was no more drinking for me; the fumes of this wretched company stank in my nostril, and I must be off to be alone with melancholy. Up I got and walked to the door with not fair-good-e’en nor fair-good-day, and I walked through the beginnings of a drab disheartening dawn in the direction that I guessed would lead me soonest to Bredalbane. I walked with a mind painfully downcast, and it was not till I reached a little hillock a good distance from the Inns at Tynree, a hillock clothed with saugh saplings and conspicuously high over the flat countryside, that I looked about me to see where I was. CHAPTER XXVIII.--LOST ON THIS MOOR OF KANNOCH.