"I don't know that we ought to let you spend so much time here, though it is quite invaluable to the business," he once said to her.
To which Miss Marchrose returned very candidly that it was always the greatest possible pleasure to her to do anything for Mr. Easter.
Julian quite believed it.
The friendship established between her and Mark was founded on excellent good comradeship, a mutual respect for one another's power of work, and the very admirable sense of humour possessed by each.
Julian, watching the frank gaiety of her manner as she came to accept him in the light of Mark's friend instead of merely as a director of the College, found himself wondering from time to time if Miss Marchrose, sharp-tongued and quick-witted, apt at satire even at her gentlest, could by any possibility ever have been the heroine where Captain Clarence Isbister, youthful, sporting, and essentially British, had once been the hero. His wife appeared inclined to let the question rest, and Julian had no desire to remind her of it; but for the satisfaction of his own curiosity, he told himself, he would have liked to establish the proof or otherwise of Fuller's verdict to which he was only half inclined to subscribe—"hard as nails."
It was Edna, however, who returned to the charge of Miss Marchrose's identity.
"I might have known it," her husband reflected.
He heard with his accustomed phlegm of manner, that Edna, conducting the nature-class through a certain small wood just off the Rossiter estate, in order to introduce it to a sunset effect visible through the beech-trees, had met with an interruption before anyone had had time to do more than ejaculate a preliminary "Wonderful!"
"They are apt to be a shade blatant, poor dears! and talk about the sun looking like a ball of fire in the sky and that sort of thing."
"You could scarcely ask for a more accurate description, after all," murmured Julian.