I had got my hand read a score of times ere this (for I am of a nature curious and prying), and each time the reading was different, but it did not altogether shake my faith in wise women; so, half for the fun of it, I put some silver pieces in the loof of my hand and held it before the woman, the transaction unnoticed by the company. She gave the common harangue to start with. At last, “There’s a girl with a child,” said she.
“Faith, and she never went to the well with the dish-clout then,” said the black man, using a well-known Gaelic proverb, meaning a compliment in his dirty assumption.
“She’s in a place of many houses now,” went on the woman, busy upon the lines of my hand, “and her mind is taken up with a man in the ranks of Argile.”
“That’s not reading the hand at all, goodwife,” said I; “those small facts of life are never written in a line across the loof.”
“Jean is no apprentice at the trade,” said her man across her shoulder. “She can find a life’s history in the space of a hair.”
“The man found the woman and the child under a root of fir,” said the woman, “and if the man is not very quick to follow her, he may find kinship’s courting get the better of a far-off lover’s fancy.”
“Dhè!” said I; “you have your story most pat. And what now, would you say, would be the end of it all—coming to the real business of the palmist, which, I take it, is not to give past history but to forecast fate?”
I’ll not deny but I was startled by the woman’s tale, for here was Betty and here was MacLachlan put before me as plainly as they were in my own mind day and night since we left Inneraora.
The woman more closely scrutinised my hand, paused a while, and seemed surprised herself at its story.
“After all,” said she, “the woman is not going to marry the man she loves.”