"How came Jean Gordon to say that you were the gardener at Balmaghie?" I
asked of him, when I was a little satisfied with looking at him.

"Why, because I am the gardener at Balmaghie--second gardener!" answered
Wat, smiling in a sly way that he had when he meant to provoke and
mystify me. Yet a way that I liked not ill, for he never used it save
when he had within him a light and merry heart.

But I knew by this time how to counter his stroke, which was to hold
one's peace, as if one cared nothing about the matter. For in this Wat
was just like a woman, or a fencer, whom it provokes more to measure a
thrust and avoid, than a hundred times to parry and return.

But for all I could not keep the anxiety out of my eyes as we walked
along.

"You do not want to hear," said he, provoking me; for because of Maisie
Lennox and my mother, he knew that he had the better of me.

"But I do, though!" That was all I could say.

For indeed the matter was a mystery to me, as well it might be. Wat
Gordon of Lochinvar, sometime favourite of her Grace the Duchess of
Wellwood, now gardener to a latitudinarian and cavalier Galloway laird,
that had been a ferlie even on a day of miracles.

Wat continued to smile and smile.

"Well, I will tell you," he said. Yet for a while did not, but only
walked on smiling.

At last he pursed his mouth and began to whistle. It was a bar or two of
the air "Kate Kennedy is my darling."

Now at that time I own that I was not bright in the uptake about such
things. For I had not till lately concerned me much with love and
women's favours, but it came across me all in an instant.

"Oh!" I said.

"Ah!" said Wat.

And we looked at one another and nodded--Wat defiantly.

"Kate of the black eyebrows!" I said musingly. "They are joined over her
brow," I went on, "and her ear comes straight down to her neck without
any rounded lobe. They are two well-considered signs!"

Wat Gordon stopped suddenly, and cried out at me.

"See here, William Gordon, what mean you by that? What if her eyebrows
meet under her chin and her ears hang down like band strings? What is
that to you?"

"Happily nothing!" said I--for I was patiently paying him out, as it is
ever easy to do with a spit-fire like young Lochinvar.

"Speak plain, Will," he cried, "or by the Lord I will immediately run
you through!"

"With a spade," said I, mocking. "Mind, Wat, you are a laird's second
gardener now."

But when I perceived th