He always waits till we
make the first advance; he doesn't go out of his way to cheat us;
he loiters about till we ask him to do it."
"Seymour," my brother-in-law responded, 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.
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