“What has that to do wi’ ’t?” rapped out the smith, uncomfortably.

Dite shuddered.  “Man,” he said, “does that letter no bring Double Dykes back terrible vive again!  If we was to see him climbing the cemetery dyke the now, and coming stepping down the fields in his moleskin waistcoat wi’ the pearl buttons—­”

Auchterlonie stopped him with a nervous gesture.

“But it couldna be the pearl buttons,” Dite added thoughtfully, “for Betty Finlayson has been wearing them to the kirk this four year.  Ay, ay, Double Dykes, that puts you farther awa’ again.”

The smith took the letter to a neighbor’s house to ask the advice of old Irons, the blind tailor, who when he lost his sight had given himself the name of Blinder for bairns to play with.

“Make your mind easy, smith,” was Blinder’s counsel.  “The letter is meant for the Painted Lady.  What’s Double Dykes?  It’s but the name of a farm, and we gave it to Sanders because he was the farmer.  He’s dead, and them that’s in the house now become Double Dykes in his place.”

But the Painted Lady only had the house, objected Dite; Nether Drumgley was farming the land, and so he was the real Double Dykes.  True, she might have pretended to her friends that she had the land also.

She had no friends, the smith said, and since she came to Double Dykes from no one could find out where, though they knew her furniture was bought in Tilliedrum, she had never got a letter.  Often, though, as she passed his window she had keeked sideways at the letters, as bairns might look at parlys.  If he made a tinkle with his hammer at such times off she went at once, for she was as easily flichtered as a field of crows, that take wing if you tap your pipe on the loof of your hand.  It was true she had spoken to him once; when he suddenly saw her standing at his smiddy door, the surprise near made him fall over his brot.  She looked so neat and ladylike that he gave his hair a respectful pull before he remembered the kind of woman she was.

And what was it she said to him?  Dite asked eagerly.

She had pointed to the letters on the window-sill, and said she, “Oh, the dear loves!” It was a queer say, but she had a bonny English word.  The English word was no doubt prideful, but it melted in the mouth like a lick of sirup.  She offered him sixpence for a letter, any letter he liked, but of course he refused it.  Then she prigged with him just to let her hold one in her hands, for said she, bairnlike, “I used to get one every day.”  It so happened that one of the letters was to Mysy Bobbie; and Mysy was of so little importance that he thought there would be no harm in letting the Painted Lady hold her letter, so he gave it to her, and you should have seen her dawting it with her hand and holding it to her breast like a lassie with a pigeon.  “Isn’t it sweet?” she said, and before he could stop her she kissed it.  She forgot it was no letter of hers, and made to open it, and