“By starting on the sure basis that she will act with cussedness, either overt or concealed, be it remembered. But what I want you to see is, that as long as you go on setting up these clay idols pro tem, it’s all right. Only don’t come to me and ask me to help you to hang one of them round your neck for life. You’ll find it a lumping heavy burden, my boy, I don’t care who it is, even if it doesn’t throttle you at the start.”
Two days after the boating incident Philip was strolling in the garden of the hotel with Alma and her aunt. It was Sunday, and they had just returned from the little tabernacle where, during his month of office, the irrepressible Scott dispensed spiritual nourishment to his flock—or was supposed to—and whither it is to be feared that one of the trio had betaken himself in obedience to the vitiated motives ascribed to him by sundry disappointed mammas above mentioned.
“What do you think I heard some of them saying as we came out of church?” said Mrs Wyatt, with an amused smile. “That Mr Scott’s sermon about the storm on Gennesaret was the finest ever preached.”
“Ha-ha! So it was, in one sense,” said Philip. “I know I was divided between an impulse to hurl a book at his head and to roar out laughing. You should have seen the fellow grovelling at the bottom of the boat and screaming—Wasn’t he, Miss Wyatt?”
“The poor man was rather frightened, certainly,” replied Alma. “But I never for a moment expected we should live through it. In fact, I was horribly frightened myself—quite shaken all day yesterday.”
“You!” cried Philip, in a blending of admiration and tenderness and incredulity. “I never heard such a libel in my life. But for your splendid nerve we should all have gone to the bottom, to a dead certainty. Even old Fordham admitted that much.”
“No—no?” expostulated Alma, a tinge of colour suffusing her face. “Please don’t try and make a heroine of me. And, talking of Mr Fordham, you know I told you the other day I didn’t like him, and you were very much offended with me.”
“I might have been with any one else,” he replied, meaningly.
“Well, now,” she went on rather shyly, “I want to retract what I said then. I never saw a man behave so splendidly in an emergency as he did.”