"Good gracious! It's past two o'clock," she exclaimed, at last, when her appetite began to assert itself in spite of ozone and flattery. "How time flies!"
"I dine at half past two. We'd better be strolling back."
It was after that hour when they reached Aberdeen, because David Bligh was continually stopping on the desolate roads that led across the low-lying lands between the city and the sea to illustrate with snatches of song many episodes of his adventurous life as an actor in musical comedy. Dorothy might have been bored by all this talk about himself if he had not made it so clear that he really did admire her; as it was, she assented warmly when he murmured, outside her lodgings:
"How quickly one can make friends sometimes!"
How quickly, indeed, when a man will show his admiration with his eyes and a woman with her ears.
The others had not returned from their expedition along Deeside when tea was finished, so Dorothy and the tenor took down the photographs and china ornaments from the top of the piano, and presently an unfamiliar sound brought in Mrs. Maclachlan, the landlady, to say that the piano had not been used since her eldest daughter died ten years ago, and that she would prefer that it was not used now. This was the kind of occasion on which Dorothy missed Sylvia, who would have known how to deal with the old woman; but David Bligh, without heeding her protests, continued to strum. Mrs. Maclachlan at once put the bass clef out of action by sitting down upon the notes, where, with arms akimbo, she maintained her position and poured forth a torrent of unintelligible Scots labials. Dorothy, horrified at the idea of a brawl with a woman who, even if she did let rooms, obviously belonged to the servant class, begged the actor not to play any more. In the end he agreed to resign from the contest with Mrs. Maclachlan on condition that Dorothy would try her voice on the piano in his rooms, where he was so encouraging about its quality that she gave herself up to serious study, one result of which was that henceforth she always had the second bedroom to herself, because her voice seemed to require most exercise when Sylvia and Lily required most sleep. The other girls in the company showed no inclination to believe that Dorothy's friendship with David Bligh was founded upon his skill in voice-production and they used to declare with conscious virtue that such singing-lessons were merely an excuse for making love.
"Be careful, dear, with Bligh," Fay Onslow warned Dorothy. "He's known all over the road for the way he treats girls. Look at May Seymour! Really, I'm quite sorry for the poor thing. I'm sure she's beginning to look her age."
This was good news about May Seymour, who had ignored her when she joined the company; but though in other respects the leading lady's fate might serve as a warning, Dorothy was much too secure of herself to need any advice about David Bligh. To be sure, he had several times seized the opportunity of examining his pupil's throat to kiss her, but she had accepted the kisses with no more sense of their reality than if they had been a doctor's bill, which in a way they were. However, Dorothy was not accustomed to let herself be over-charged, and these kisses were the only honorarium Mr. Bligh ever got. He was so much piqued by her indifference that he mistook for a grand passion the mortification set up by his failure to get her hopelessly in love with him, and he made such a complete fool of himself over Dorothy that the girls of the company were more annoyed than ever, and from having at first been charitably anxious about her virtue they now became equally severe upon her cruelty.
"The poor boy's getting quite thin," Fay Onslow declared. "You really oughtn't to treat him like that. It's beginning to show in his acting."
Dorothy consulted Sylvia about David Bligh's decline, not because she cared whether he was declining or not, but because it was an excuse to talk about herself.