"Just a tiny, tiny little one. Now do go right away, there's a dear boy."
Thus adjured, it was scarcely possible for Mr. Garrett to do otherwise than to obey, but it would have shown but little knowledge of his capabilities as an engaged young man to expect him to do so without a last mirthful flight of fancy.
"Then I'm weel awa'," he exclaimed, in a Scotch manner that almost compensated for the lack of relevance in his choice of idiom, and swung his long legs over the sill of the low window, scraping the paint with his boots as he did so and annoying Sir Julian.
"It's about Miss Marchrose," said Iris, her head even more on one side than usual.
Sir Julian wondered whether he could possibly stop her before she said anything more.
"At first I liked her awfully. In fact, I think she's sweet. But the story about the poor man she threw over is perfectly dreadful. Of course, she couldn't have cared for him really, because any woman——"
"I know all about that," hastily interrupted Sir Julian. "Surely we needn't go into a thing that happened several years ago before she ever came here, and which is no one's business but hers."
"If it had been Douglas," pursued Miss Easter, fixing an enormous pair of melancholy eyes upon her discomfited listener, "if it had been Douglas, however much of an invalid he had to be, I should simply want to marry him all the more. I should want to give up my whole life to him, so as to make up a little."
"Well, I hope you may never be tried in such a terrible manner," said Julian, unable to repress a shudder of horrified sympathy for the invalid who should find his shattered life relegated to the devotion of Miss Easter.
"But of course, she couldn't have loved him really," asserted Iris, apparently unaware of a certain lack of originality in her choice of comment.