"Do I not?" she said. His hand remained in hers. He began to talk of the whins on the links and the sanderlings along the flats, with such a Scots voice and in phrases so vivid that she saw her childhood again, and had in her eyes a wetness of a happier order. She released his cool hand after a long gentle pressure. But when it was gone it was as if much of her life went. She said: "You'll be knowing Kingussie House, just outside your town. It was there I spent my holidays as a child."
He answered:
"Maybe I played round it a barefoot lad and you in your grandeur within."
She said:
"Oh, no! Hardly! There would be the difference of our ages! And . . . And indeed there are other things I will tell you."
She addressed herself to Tietjens, with all her heroic armour of charm buckled on again:
"Only think! I find Mr. Macmaster and I almost played together in our youths."
He looked at her, she knew, with a commiseration that she hated:
"Then you're an older friend than I," he asked, "though I've known him since I was fourteen, and I don't believe you could be a better. He's a good fellow. . ."
She hated him for his condescension towards a better man and for his warning—she knew it was a warning—to her to spare his friend.