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.

I stood on the hillock clothed with its stunted saughtrees and waited
for the day that was mustering somewhere to the cast, far by the frozen
sea of moss and heather tuft. A sea more lonely than any ocean the most
wide and distant, where no ship heaves, and no isle lifts beckoning
trees above the level of the waves; a sea soundless, with no life below
its lamentable surface, no little fish or proud leviathan plunging and
romping and flashing from the silver roof of fretted wave dishevelled
to the deep profound. The moorfowl does not cry there, the coney has no
habitation. It rolled, that sea so sour, so curdled, from my feet away
to mounts I knew by day stupendous and not so far, but now in the dark
so hid that they were but troubled clouds upon the distant marge. There
was a day surely when, lashing up on those hills around, were waters
blue and stinging, and some plague-breath blew on them and they shivered
and dried and cracked into this parched semblan