"Of course I'll make it!"
She put her hand on his suddenly. "Don't, Rick! don't! I mean"--she paused, looking at him curiously--"you may make it if you like, Rick; but I won't promise to wear it--always."
[VI]
"We ought to have gone over to-day," said Eustace Gordon, looking out to where the low sandy line of Eilean-a-fa-ash lay like a golden clasp between the two headlands. The northern one bold, rocky, heathery; the southern, a mere spit of bent-covered shingle, curving hornlike from the great sweep of the Grâda Sands beyond. It was sunset,--a cloudless sunset. Sky, and sea, and sand, bathed in a golden flood of light; only the shallow stretches of water left behind by the retreating tide glowing iridescent here and there like jewels. Far away, almost beyond sight, an edge of foam keeping time to a whispering cadence told where the Atlantic was hushing the shore to sleep.
"Yes!" he went on lazily. "We ought, but we didn't. That fellow Weeks is always on the slay."
They were seated, a party of five,--for the professor still lingered in the grip of cold,--on the base of the northern headland. There, amongst the rocks and heather, Lady Maud and Cynthia Strong had been making tea for the shooters. A brace of setters lay panting beside the game-bags; a faint whiff of smoke from behind a boulder told that the ghillies were enjoying themselves on their master's tobacco--sure sign of a good day's sport.
"Gorgeous weather," continued the same contented voice, "a whole week of it; simply idyllic."
"Ever since Mr. Wilson and the others left," assented Rick Halmar. "Pity they went, isn't it?"
"Mr. Wilson had to go," put in Lady Maud. "The telegram from the works was urgent, and then the Collinghams' yacht happening to come in the same day made it so convenient. Quite a coincidence; one of those things no one could have foreseen." She spoke impatiently, almost in an aggrieved tone; and Eustace, as he lay on his back staring up into the sky, smiled to himself.
"It is very curious how such things happen," remarked Cynthia Strong; "but that they are comparatively common is indubitable. The very proverbs in our language prove it." In the professor's absence she was apt to assume the mantle of his manner in order to annihilate poor Captain Weeks, in which object she generally succeeded. On this occasion, however, emboldened by a recent reception of some golden plovers' wings, for which her new tweed hat had been waiting, he ventured to put in his oar. "The wish is father to the thought, for instance."