"Tom," she cried, "I declare you have waxed the ends of your moustache!"
"And if I had been in Italy, I should have curled my hair, too," he replied imperturbably. "It is not a crime."
"And that coat! It is not your ordinary one."
"It is not. The one I use here--since you are so particular--is a dress jacket; the correct thing, I assure you, for a shooting lodge. But I have the misfortune to be honorary surgeon to a potentate somewhere, who insists on brass buttons on state occasions, so I don't happen to have the intermediate affair. Besides, there are to be lord-lieutenants and generals hanging round this evening from the Oban gathering. If that is satisfactory to your highness, we should be going."
"And that red thing in your buttonhole?" she persisted, going close up to him and touching the bit of ribbon with dainty curious finger. "It is the Legion of Honour, I suppose."
"It is called so; you look as if that were a crime also."
"I did not know you had it, that was all," she said. And then, Will, coming in full of fuss because his very occasional white tie had not been folded properly in the wash, changed the venue by declaring that fine feathers make fine birds, and that he was half ashamed to belong to them.
"Naethin' o' the sort, Will," snapped Mrs. Cameron. "It's the fine birds that grows the fine feathers, as ye'd see ony day o' the week if ye went to my hen yard."
"And it is always the male bird which attends most to personal appearance," remarked Marjory, sedately. Yet, despite her pretended disdain, as they passed down the drawing-room corridor at Gleneira House, she paused involuntarily to look for a second at what she saw reflected in a pier glass at the end.
"We do look nice, Tom," she said, with a faint laugh; "but I feel like the old woman. I'm sure it isn't I. Now, you look as if you were born to it."