She put on a little air of vanity, the vanity of a woman who knows a secret the rest of the world, and man particularly, is itching to hear. “Oh, I daresay he has some one in his mind,” she admitted; “and I daresay I know who it might be too, for I was the first to sweel the baby and the last to dress its mother--blessing with her!” M’I ver turned round and looked her, with cunning humour, in the face. “I might well guess that,” he said; “you have the best name in the countryside for these offices, that many a fumbling dame botches. I suppose,” he added, when the pleasure in her face showed his words had found her vanity--“I suppose you mean the bairn up in Carlunnan?” “That’s the very one,” she said with a start; “but who told you?” “Tuts!” said he, slyly, “the thing’s well enough known about the Castle, and MacLachlan himself never denied he was the father. Do you think a secret like that could be kept in a clattering parish like Inneraora?” “You’re the first I ever heard get to the marrow of it,” confessed the Dame Dubh. “MacLachlan himself never thought I was in the woman’s confidence, and I’ve seen him in Carlunnan there since I came home, pretending more than a cousin’s regard for the Provost’s daughter so that he might share in the bairn’s fondling. He did it so well, too, that the lady herself would talk of its fatherless state with tears in her eyes.” I stood by, stunned at the revelation that brought joy from the very last quarter where I would have sought it. But I must not let my rapture at the idea of MacLachlan’s being no suitor of the girl go too far till I confirmed this new intelligence. “Perhaps,” I said in a little to the woman, “the two of them fondling the bairn were chief enough, though they did not share the secret of its fatherhood.” “Chief!” she cried; “the girl has no more notion of MacLachlan than I have, if an old woman’s eyes that once were clear enough for such things still show me anything. I would have been the first to tell her how things stood if I had seen it otherwise. No, no; Mistress Brown has an eye in other quarters. What do you say to that, Barbreck?” she added, laughing slyly to my friend. A great ease came upon my mind; it was lightened of a load that had lain on it since ever my Tynree spaewife found, or pretended to find, in my silvered loof such an unhappy portent of my future. And then this rapture was followed by a gladness no less profound that Mac-Lachlan, bad as he had been, was not the villain quite I had fancied: if he had bragged of conquests, it had been with truth though not with decency.