"Will ye go on a cruise with me?" says he from the doorway with no introduction whatever.
"Would it be an unseemly prying into your affairs to ask where to?" I inquired with a smile.
"North or south," said he, still keeping his place by the door. "It's immaterial to me, so I escape accompanying my womenfolk to London."
"And if I go with ye," says I, "your wife will like me less than she does now."
"That would be impossible, so ye needn't worry over it," he returned dryly. "The only good word ye ever had from her was that if ye'd been a less handsome man ye might have been a better one."
"And even that could scarce be termed fulsome flattery," I observed.
"Will ye go!" he repeated, his mind set on the one point.
A sudden thought, bred of some news in the paper which I had just received, came to me upon the instant.
"Let us take the boat from Leith, and go north by the Orkney and Hebrides Islands, through the Minch to the west coast. There are all kinds of stories afloat concerning the gipsies and free traders who live in those deep coves; we might fall in with a pirate ship——"
"Or find a hidden treasure!" he said scoffingly, as he seated himself on the other side of the table and took some coffee, the frown gone, and the Sandy I knew with the bright face and laughing eye back again.