king, my young leddy, to be traveling
alone."

The time had been when Anne would have answered sharply enough. The hard
necessities of her position made her patient now.

"I have already told you," she said, "my husband is coming here to
join me." She sighed wearily as she repeated her ready-made story--and
dropped into the nearest chair, from sheer inability to stand any
longer.

Mistress Inchbare looked at her, with the exact measure of compassionate
interest which she might have shown if she had been looking at a stray
dog who had fallen footsore at the door of the inn.

"Weel! weel! sae let it be. Bide awhile, and rest ye. We'll no' chairge
ye for that--and we'll see if your husband comes. I'll just let the
rooms, mistress, to _him,_, instead o' lettin' them to _you._ And, sae,
good-morrow t' ye." With that final announcement of her royal will and
pleasure, the Empress of the Inn withdrew.

Anne made no reply. She watched the landlady out of the room--and then
struggled to control herself no longer. In her position, suspicion was
doubly insult. The hot tears of shame gathered in her eyes; and the
heart-ache wrung her, poor soul--wrung her without mercy.

A trifling noise in the room startled her. She looked up, and detected
a man in a corner, dusting the furniture, and apparently acting in the
capacity of attendant at the inn. He had shown her into the parlor on
her arrival; but he had remained so quietly in the room that she had
never noticed him since, until that moment.

He was an ancient man--with one eye filmy and blind, and one eye moist
and merry. His head was bald; his feet were gouty; his nose was justly
celebrated as the largest nose and the reddest nose in that part of
Scotland. The mild wisdom of years was expressed mysteriously in his
mellow smile. In contact with this wicked world, his manner revealed
that happy mixture of two extremes--the servility which just
touches independence, and the independence which just touches
servility--attained by no men in existence but Scotchmen. Enormous
native impudence, which amused but never offended; immeasurable cunning,
masquerading habitually under the double disguise of quaint prejudice
and dry humor, were the solid moral foundations on which the character
of this elderly person was built. No amount of whisky ever made him
drunk; and no violence of bell-ringing ever hurried his movements. Such
was the headwaiter at the Craig Fernie Inn; known, far and w