“Come here, my lass,” he called to her, and then said inquisitively, “I’m told Mr. McLean is at his tea with Miss Ailie every day?”

“And it’s true,” replied Gavinia, in huge delight, “and what’s more, she has given him some presents.”

“You say so, lassie!  What were they now?”

“I dinna ken,” Gavinia had to admit, dejectedly.  “She took them out o’ the ottoman, and it has aye been kept looked.”

McQueen looked very knowingly at her.  “Will he, think you?” he asked mysteriously.

The maid seemed to understand, for she replied, promptly, “I hope he will.”

“But he hasna spiered her as yet, you think?”

“No,” she said, “no, but he calls her Ailie, and wi’ the gentry it’s but one loup frae that to spiering.”

“Maybe,” answered the doctor, “but it’s a loup they often bogle at.  I’se uphaud he’s close on fifty, Gavinia?”

“There’s no denying he is by his best,” she said regretfully, and then added, with spirit, “but Miss Ailie’s no heavy, and in thae grite arms o’ his he could daidle her as if she were an infant.”

This bewildered McQueen, and he asked, “What are you blethering about, Gavinia?” to which she replied, regally, “Wha carries me, wears me!” The doctor concluded that it must be Den language.

“And I hope he’s good enough for her,” continued Miss Ailie’s warm-hearted maid, “for she deserves a good ane.”

“She does,” McQueen agreed heartily; “ay, and I believe he is, for he breathes through his nose instead of through his mouth; and let me tell you, Gavinia, that’s the one thing to be sure of in a man before you take him for better or worse.”

The astounded maid replied, “I’ll ken better things than that about my lad afore I take him,” but the doctor assured her that it was the box which held them all, “though you maun tell no one, lassie, for it’s my one discovery in five and thirty years of practice.”

Seeing that, despite his bantering tone, he was speaking seriously, she pressed him for his meaning, but he only replied sadly, “You’re like the rest, Gavinia, I see it breaking out on you in spots.”

“An illness!” she cried, in alarm.

“Ay, lassie, an illness called curiosity.  I had just been telling Mr. McLean that curiosity is essentially a woman’s ailment, and up you come ahint to prove it.”  He shook a finger at her reprovingly, and was probably still reflecting on woman’s ways when Grizel walked home at midnight breathing through her nose, and Tommy fell asleep with his mouth open.  For Tommy could never have stood the doctor’s test of a man.  In the painting of him, aged twenty-four, which was exhibited in the Royal Academy, his lips meet firmly, but no one knew save himself how he gasped after each sitting.

CHAPTER XXVIII

BUT IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN MISS KITTY