"I wonder how I shall like it?" she continued. "I wonder if it will be what I have fancied it?"
"Probably not," replied her companion, with a quick dread at his heart. For how could it be so? What could this girl's imagining have to do with that world which he knew so well: so well that the finer tissue in him rebelled against the teaching which his very profession forced him to accept as true, at any rate for the majority of men and women. "Probably not," he repeated more quietly, "though that is just the sort of thing it is impossible to predict of a girl who has been brought up as you have. So it must be settled by experience."
Half an hour afterwards Paul Macleod, coming over to the Lodge on the pretence of giving notice of an afternoon rehearsal, found them still busy over the loves and woes of Henri and Blanche. In fact, Dr. Kennedy was on his knees disclaiming his part passionately; whereat the newcomer frowned. First at the sight, secondly at his own dislike to it.
"I have been trying to teach Miss Carmichael how to refuse an aspirant firmly, yet sympathetically," said the doctor, coolly, rising to his feet and putting the handkerchief he had spread on the ground into his pocket; "but she finds a difficulty, apparently, in keeping her countenance. It is a mistake, Marjory. Half the unhappy marriages in the world come from the difficulty which the untutored mind has in saying 'No' with decent courtesy. It is so much easier to say 'Yes,' since that requires no diplomacy. If I had daughters I should always impress on them that the eleventh commandment does not consist in 'Thou shalt not refuse.'"
"I shouldn't have thought it necessary to impress that on the girls of the present day," remarked Paul, rather hastily, and Marjory flushed up at once.
"It is never safe to generalise from a single experience, Captain Macleod," she retorted, "and yours may have been exceptionally fortunate--hitherto."
"Perhaps it has--hitherto," he replied, and, after delivering his message, went off in a huff. Yet he felt himself more on a plane with Marjory than he had ever done before, slightly to his discomfiture; for this atmosphere of quick give and take, this suspicion of jealous anger, was familiar to him, and he could not mistake its possibilities. So he devoted himself more than usual to his duty, and though, of course, he made up his tiff a trifle sentimentally with Marjory, he chose to be rather lordly over her relations with Dr. Kennedy, and even went so far as to mention to his sister that he suspected her protégé, Mr. Gillespie, was forestalled.
"My dear Paul!" said Lady George, distractedly, "I really don't care at the present moment who marries who. I might be in a better world for that matter, if I weren't in Purgatory."
"Wherefore?" asked Paul, kindly.
"Oh! the supper, and the servants, and the general civility," replied Blanche, who was in reality enjoying the bustle, but, at the same time, liked to pose as a victim. "Really, in these out-of-the-way places one has to be a virtuous woman, and bring one's food from afar; and then there is always Blasius. I suppose it is the name, as you say, George, but, really, I don't believe that child can do what is right."