“I think you should make an effort. You must consider me as insisting. You won’t get in my way, nor I in yours. I meant to go a couple of miles down—I did indeed.”
The situation which five minutes ago was so appalling had quite lost its horror; it was no longer unfaceable. Had Maud been told that morning that in the inscrutable decrees of Fate she was going to be caught poaching before lunch, she would have wished the earth to open and swallow her sooner than that anything so unspeakable should happen to her, while even two minutes ago there was nothing in life so impossible as that she should continue her career of poaching. But her captor was so unaffectedly friendly, his amusement, also, at her horror and the cause of it so sincerely kind, that she was no longer horrified.
“Really, Mr. Cochrane, it is too good of you,” she said. “But you must first put me at my ease about one thing. You do know—don’t you?—how dreadfully sorry I am, and that I hadn’t the very slightest idea that Thurso had let the fishing. Oh, by the way, I really am Lady Maud Raynham.”
“Why, yes,” he said, and paused. “Then it’s all settled.”
The whole situation had gone, vanished, before his perfect simplicity and kindliness, and she smiled back at him.
“Thank you very much,” she said. “I shall love to have this day on the river.”
“And Duncan?” he said. “Pray keep him if you wish; otherwise I shall send him home. His wife is ill of this—this typhoid.”
“Oh no; please let him go home, then,” said Maud.
Then Cochrane turned to the gillie.
“Get along home with you, Duncan,” he said, “and be sure—tell yourself—that you will find the wife still improving. I think you’ll find she’s been getting better all morning. But if you give her any of that medicine you will be just helping her—helping her, mind—to get worse again. You understand? If you find when you get home she is worse, give it her by all means. But you won’t find that: you will find she is better. Yes, gaff, landing-net, lunch—I’ve got them all, thanks. So off with you, and let your heart go singing. God’s looking after her this morning, as He always did. She’s going to get quite well. Don’t lose sight of that, and don’t let her lose sight of it either.”