esponded, in a severe tone, "there
you are, now, doing the very thing I warned you not to do! You're
succumbing to a preconception. Avoid fixed ideas. The probability
is this man _is_ Colonel Clay. Strangers are generally scarce at
Seldon. If he isn't Colonel Clay, what's he here for, I'd like
to know? What money is there to be made here in any other way?
I shall inquire about him."

We dropped in at the Cromarty Arms, and asked good Mrs. M'Lachlan
if she could tell us anything about the gentlemanly stranger. Mrs.
M'Lachlan replied that he was from London, she believed, a pleasant
gentleman enough; and he had his wife with him.

"Ha! Young? Pretty?" Charles inquired, with a speaking glance at me.

"Weel, Sir Charles, she'll no be exactly what you'd be ca'ing a
bonny lass," Mrs. M'Lachlan replied; "but she's a guid body for
a' that, an' a fine braw woman."

"Just what I should expect," Charles murmured, "He varies the
programme. The fellow has tried White Heather as the parson's wife,
and as Madame Picardet, and as squinting little Mrs. Granton, and
as Medhurst's accomplice; and now, he has almost exhausted the
possibilities of a disguise for a really young and pretty woman;
so he's playing her off at last as the riper product--a handsome
matron. Clever, extremely clever; but--we begin to see through him."
And he chuckled to himself quietly.

Next day, on the hillside, we came upon our stranger again,
occupied as before in peering into the rocks, and sounding them
with a hammer. Charles nudged me and whispered, "I have it this
time. He's posing as a geologist."

I took a good look at the man. By now, of course, we had some
experience of Colonel Clay in his various disguises; and I could
observe that while the nose, the hair, and the beard were varied,
the eyes and the build remained the same as ever. He was a trifle
stouter, of course, being got up as a man of between forty and
fifty; and his forehead was lined in a way which a less consummate
artist than Colonel Clay could easily have imitated. But I felt we
had at least some grounds for our identification; it would not do
to dismiss the suggestion of Clayhood at once as a flight of fancy.

His wife was sitting near, upon a bare boss of rock, reading a
volume of poems. Capital variant, that, a volume of poems! Exactly
suited the selected type of a cultivated family. White Heather and
Mrs. Granton never used to read poems. But that was characteristic
of all Col