t by the rake of
her masts and the lines of her bow. She was coming up from the south
under jib, foresail, and mainsail; but even as we watched her all her
white canvas shut suddenly in, like a kittiwake closing her wings, and
we saw the splash of her anchor just under her bowsprit. She may have
been rather less than a quarter of a mile from the shore--so near that I
could see a tall man with a peaked cap, who stood at the quarter with a
telescope to his eye, sweeping it backwards and forwards along the
coast.

"What can they want here?" asked Edie.

"They are rich English from London," said I; for that was how we
explained everything that was above our comprehension in the border
counties. We stood for the best part of an hour watching the bonny
craft, and then, as the sun was lying low on a cloudbank and there was a
nip in the evening air, we turned back to West Inch.

As you come to the farmhouse from the front, you pass up a garden, with
little enough in it, which leads out by a wicket-gate to the road; the
same gate at which we stood on the night when the beacons were lit, the
night that we saw Walter Scott ride past on his way to Edinburgh.
On the right of this gate, on the garden side, was a bit of a rockery
which was said to have been made by my father's mother many years
before. She had fashioned it out of water-worn stones and sea shells,
with mosses and ferns in the chinks. Well, as we came in through the
gates my eyes fell upon this stone heap, and there was a letter stuck in
a cleft stick upon the top of it. I took a step forward to see what it
was, but Edie sprang in front of me, and plucking it off she thrust it
into her pocket.

"That's for me," said she, laughing. But I stood looking at her with a
face which drove the laugh from her lips.

"Who is it from, Edie?" I asked.

She pouted, but made no answer.

"Who is it from, woman?" I cried. "Is it possible that you have been as
false to Jim as you were to me?"

"How rude you are, Jock!" she cried. "I do wish that you would mind
your own business."

"There is only one person that it could be from," I cried. "It is from
this man de Lapp!"

"And suppose that you are right, Jock?"

The coolness of the woman amazed and enraged me.

"You confess it!" I cried. "Have you, then, no shame left?"

"Why should I not receive letters from this gentleman?"

"Because it is infamous."

"And why?"

"Because he is a stranger."

"On the con