She looked at him, and a troubled expression came to her eyes. "I suppose not," she said absently; "that has always been a puzzle to me. To love, and yet not to approve, seems to me a contradiction in terms." The chips flew faster from the knot Dr. Kennedy was smoothing.
"You talk as if love were reducible to logic, but it isn't." Then the impossibility of a mutual understanding made him add more gently: "It isn't a thing you can reason about. It comes and goes as it chooses--not as you choose. That is the difficulty."
"Difficulty," echoed Marjory, raising herself with a belligerent air to clasp her hands about her knees and subside again into a half-dreamy defiance as she sate looking out over the burn to the sunlit point stretching into the blue loch. "It is manifestly unfair if it is so; only I don't think it is. Else how is it possible to hold love sacred? How is it possible to believe in it?"
"I am afraid it will be believed in to the end of the chapter all the same," replied her hearer, with a smile. "And it isn't so unfair when all is said and done, since 'a love that is tender and true and strong crowneth the life of the giver.'"
She turned on him sharply. "Where does that come from? Some extremely sentimental---- Why, Tom! I believe you wrote that--now did you? Come! own up!"
"I might have guessed it wouldn't pass muster with a young person who has taken honours in English literature and knows the Elizabethan poets by heart," he replied gravely. "Yes! Marjory, I am responsible for that particular version of a time-honoured, crusted old sentiment. I wrote it in delirium, or something like it--if that is any excuse."
She edged closer to him in girlish eagerness. "This is quite delightful. I never knew you wrote rhymes. I do, and burn them; but you! Come, tell me the rest at once."
"Perhaps I burn them, too."
"Oh! but that is only pretence, you know, just to keep oneself in subjection. One remembers them all the same. I do. So now, once, twice, thrice!"
He gave an odd little grimace. "It was last year when I had fever," he began apologetically.