"In terms of reprobation, no doubt," replied Dr. Kennedy, lightly; "a guardian is a disagreeable appendage, though I try to be as little of a nuisance as I can."
"So do I," retorted Paul, with a smile; "but Miss Carmichael is so dreadfully hard to please."
As Dr. Kennedy's keen brown eyes took in the figure before him, he told himself that the girl must be hard indeed to please if she could find fault with it.
"That is the handsomest man I've seen for a long time," he said as they walked home. "What is he like inside?"
Marjory paused with her head on one side, considering. "Oh! nice in a way--the way of the world, I suppose, and I thought him nicer than ever to-day; being in his own house agrees with him. Oh, Tom! how I wish you hadn't accepted that invitation to dinner!"
Yet when she returned from the Big House, she had a little flush on her cheek, and when Dr. Kennedy challenged her to tell truth in answer to Mrs. Cameron's inquiry as to how she got on, she answered with a laugh and a nod: "Why not--it was rather interesting; quite an evolutionary process. Before I went I was protoplasmic--all in a jelly. Then at dinner we were all amoebic--digestive apparatus and nothing else. Afterwards, with the ladies, I felt like a worm, or a fish out of water. Then I wanted to have wings like a bird and fly away, but I couldn't, for the quadrumana appeared from the dining-room, and we all became apes!"
"What is the lassie talking about?" put in Mrs. Cameron, with a toss of her head. "Can you no answer a straight question wi' a straight answer? What then, I say, what then?"
"Yes! what then, Marjory?" asked Tom Kennedy, quickly; he knew the answer, and yet he wanted to hear it from her lips, because it would satisfy him that so far he had been right.
"And then--why then I suppose I became a girl--at any rate I enjoyed it. They were all so kind, and Mrs. Vane--I suppose in your world, Tom, there are heaps of women like that?"
"Not many so charming," he answered heartily. In truth it had been very pleasant meeting her again after so many years; for a man, even when he is in love, or supposes himself to be in love, with one woman, is never proof against the pleasure of being made much of by another. And Dr. Kennedy, with a quaint simplicity and wisdom, was perfectly aware of his own reputation as one of the boldest adventurers in new fields of discovery, and told himself that people made much of him for their own sake, and because he carried his restless energy with him into society as well as into his work. For energy is, as a rule, a godsend to fin-de-siècle men and women. So the conceit of it slipped off him like water from a duck's back, leaving him free to take his world as he found it.