“Here’s Peggy back from Bailie Campbell’s,” he said to his wife, and I was convinced he did so to let me know the new-comer, who was now moving about in the kitchen across the lobby, was not the one I had expected. My disappointment must have shown in my face; I felt I was wasting moments the most precious, though it was something to be under the same roof as my lady’s relatives, under the same roof as she had slept below last night, and to see some of her actual self almost, in the smiles and eyes and turns of the voice of her mother. I stood up to go, slyly casting an eye about the chamber for the poor comfort of seeing so little as a ribbon or a shoe that was hers, but even that was denied me. The Provost, who, I’ll swear now, knew my trouble from the outset, though his wife was blind to it, felt at last constrained to relieve it. “And you must be going,” he said; “I wish you could have waited to see Betty, who’s on a visit to Carlunnan and should be home by now.” As he said it, he was tapping his snuff-mull and looking at me pawkily out of the corners of his eyes, that hovered between me and his wife, who stood with the wool in her hand, beaming mildly up in my face. I half turned on my heel and set a restless gaze on the corner of the room. For many considerations were in his simple words. That he should say them at all relieved the tension of my wonder; that he should say them in the way he did, was, in a manner, a manifestation that he guessed the real state of ray feelings to the lady whose very name I had not dared to mention to him, and that he was ready to favour any suit I pressed I was even inclined to push my reading of his remark further, and say to myself that if he had not known the lady herself favoured me, he would never have fanned my hope by even so little as an indifferent sentence. “And how is she--how is Betty?” I asked, lamely. He laughed with a pleasing slyness, and gave me a dunt with his elbow on the side, a bit of the faun, a bit of the father, a bit of my father’s friend. “You’re too blate, Colin,” he said, and then he put his arm through his wife’s and gave her a squeeze to take her into his joke. I would have laughed at the humour of it but for the surprise in the good woman’s face. It fair startled me, and yet it was no more than the look of a woman who leams that her man and she have been close company with a secret for months, and she had never made its acquaintance. There was perhaps a little more, a hesitancy in the utterance, a flush, a tone that seemed to show the subject was one to be passed bye as fast as possible. She smiled feebly a little, picked up a row of dropped stitches, and “Oh, Betty,” said she, “Betty--is--is--she’ll be back in a little. Will you not wait?” “No, I must be going,” I said; “I may have the happiness of meeting her before I go up the glen in the afternoon.”