Roger turned slowly and looked at her as she stood fumbling with the stirrup, her pleading eyes fixed on him, and the deferential sentences hurrying each other from her lips. Then he swept his hat very low, and offered his hand a second time for her foot. She accepted it, now, with a tremulous smile; and as he put it up, the next moment, to straighten her habit, she caught it between her own, palm upward, looking at it. “Only a little dust,” she said, very tenderly and reverently. “Nothing to hurt even a Lyndesay! And I didn’t weigh much heavier myself, did I? I shall always remember that you paid me the greatest honour of my life!”
She turned her horse and rode away quickly, for the tears were in her eyes, and Roger Lyndesay went slowly into the house with the note.
He found Deb in the pantry, polishing the silver candlesticks which had been William Lyndesay’s last gift to him; and again, as he looked at her bright youth and alert grace, the longing came to him that she had been a boy. He passed his hand lovingly over the shining metal, and along the inscription with its sincere words of recognition.
“They are yours, Deb, remember,” he said, laying down the letter, as she put the leather back in its place. “If I had a son, they would be his, of course, but as it is, they are yours. Keep them always. Don’t let any of the Morton people have them.”
“Just let them try!” Deb answered defiantly, hugging her treasure jealously in her arms. “Don’t be afraid, Dad. I’ll never let anybody else put a finger on them. And I’ll stick to them if I’m starving in the street, with the pair of them tucked safely under my shawl!”
“You should have been a boy!” he sighed, giving vent to his insistent thought at last. “As it is, you will have to leave Kilne when I am gone. If you had been a boy, you would have had the agency, and stayed on here for life. You would have taken on the work as a matter of course.”
“Should I?” she asked, with her eyes on the candlesticks.
“Why, certainly—if you had been a boy. You would have belonged to the old place like the rest of us. As things are, you cannot be expected to feel the call.”
“Can’t a girl feel it, then?” Deb enquired, without lifting her eyes. “Does a girl never hanker after her father’s profession, and feel that the rest of life is nothing beside it?”
He smiled faintly with a touch of amusement, shaking his head.