Guy Mannering

On a night of storm a traveller called Mannering, sheltering at the tower of Ellangowan, is pressed into casting the newborn heir's horoscope, and does not like what the stars give back. Years later the same laird clears the gypsies off his ground, and Meg Merrilies plants herself on a bank above the road to tell him he has quenched seven smoking hearths, and to ask whether his own will burn the blither for it.