appened, for cart-ropes wouldn't drag it out of him--but _something_
did, and he came in, looking battle and murder and sudden death. He was
off at crack of dawn,--and that was just a few days before Maud's fine
elopement took place. We had never had such an excitement before in
these humdrum parts, and we never shall again."

To all of this the friend, also a Scot, hearkened without emitting a
syllable.

When, however, his ear detected the accents of finality, he shook the
ashes from his pipe and opened his lips: "I fell in with the rejected
gentleman the other day".

"Foster? No? Did you? Did you really? How was that?" In an instant the
doctor was on the alert.

"I was on my holiday, doing a bit of fishing in an out-of-the-way part
of Sutherland, and there were only two or three of us in the hotel.
Foster was one."

"A tall, thin man, with a lantern-jawed face?"

"That's him. One of the others had got wind of this tale, and told me.
We were talking of you, I fancy; and he had been down here a whiley ago,
when the affair was fresh."

"What was Foster doing there?"

"Fishing like the rest of us--but always by himself. He wasn't uncivil,
only unsociable. I had a walk with him one day, and he talked about
India. A good part of his life had been spent in India, and he could
tell a lot about it, but when the talk came round home, he shut up like
a knife, and I kind of jaloused there was something wrong. That was
before I knew what it was."

"He looked--how did he look?"

"How? I can't tell you how. He just _looked_. That was enough for me."

"Well, you saw the sort of chap he was, just the one to take a woman's
fancy,--and to think that Maud Boldero could be so blind daft as to
throw him over for that poor Val, whom she could have picked up at any
time!"

"What has become of the others? Do you ever hear anything of them?"

"Sybil has married. She married pretty quickly after they left. A London
man; a barrister, I think. Sybil is good-looking enough, they are all
good-looking; though Maud's the pick of the bunch. Stop a bit, I'm not
sure that the little rascal Leonore--but no, no; she hadn't the air, the
style; it was just a way she had,--eh, she was a bit beguiling thing.
There's that new boy of mine, he has twice the go that poor Tommy had,
though nothing like the brains--but he's all over the place among the
lasses, and when I hear him whistling here and whistling there, with his
nose in at every open do