When Catriona returned the design became if possible more obvious, and she showed off the girl's advantages like a horse-couper with a horse.

My face flamed that she should think me so obtuse.

Now I would fancy the girl was being innocently made a show of, and then I could have beaten the old carline wife with a cudgel; and now, that perhaps these two had set their heads together to entrap me, and at that I sat and gloomed betwixt them like the very image of ill-will.

At last the matchmaker had a better device, which was to leave the pair of us alone.

When my suspicions are anyway roused it is sometimes a little the wrong side of easy to allay them.