"Why? Because the bosom of my family was absorbed in conic sections! And if that reason won't do, you really must wait until I have had some veal--for to tell truth I'm ravenous--mostly for drinks!"
He watched her as she flew off, singing as she went like any blackbird out of sheer lightness of heart, and asked himself if this were not enough? If he were bound to wait for something more? For Dr. Tom Kennedy was not a man to require much time for such thoughts, especially when he had been thinking of Marjory and his welcome all that trudge of thirty miles over bog and heather. But the answer came slowly, for he was quite as much in the dark on the vexed question of Love and Marriage as most people, and the little Blind Boy with the bow and arrows was as yet a part of his Pantheon. And yet there was temptation enough to set mere romance aside, when, after anticipating his every want, and fussing over him after the manner of a hen with a solitary chicken, Marjory drew a low stool beside his chair, and, with her elbows resting on her knees and her radiant face supported on her hands, looked over him, as it were, in sheer content.
"You don't know how nice it is to have you back," she said, suddenly stretching out one hand to him--a favourite gesture of hers when eager. He took it in both of his, bent over it, and kissed it.
"'Tis worth the parting, child, to come back--to this."
She laughed merrily. "You have such pretty manners, Tom! I expect you learnt them from grandpapa the Marquis and the haute noblesse. And then in Paris, I suppose----"
His heart contracted, but he interrupted her gaily. "I decline to be scheduled in that fashion. My manners are my own, thank Heaven! in spite of Galton on heredity. Oh! Marjory, my dear! what a relief it is to get away from it all--from the eternal hunt for something that escapes you--from the first chapter of Genesis to the Book of Revelation; and now that I come to think of it, there is something new about you--what is it?"
She shook her head hastily. "Nothing. You said that last time, I believe--people always look different. You have got greyer."
He rubbed his close-cropped head disconsolately. "Have I?--well, I can't help it. I'm getting old."
"Nonsense! And I won't have you say you are glad to get away from work--from the best work in the world! How can you tire of the only thing worth anything, and of the search for truth?"
"Because I'm forty-three--more than double your age. By the way, there was a man I know who married a girl of sixteen when he was thirty-two. And when he saw it down on the register it struck him all of a heap that when she was forty he would be eighty. Matrimony, apparently, isn't good for arithmetic--nor for the matter of that, arithmetic for matrimony!"