“Two thousand dollars—nothing less?” she inquired gaily. “You are too specific for a real lover.”
“Fate fixed the amount,” he added drily. “Fate—you talk so much of Fate,” she replied gravely, and her eyes looked into the distance. “You make me think of it too, and I don’t want to do so. I don’t want to feel helpless, to be the child of Accident and Destiny.”
“Oh, you get the same thing in the ‘fore-ordination’ that old Minister M’Gregor preaches every Sunday. ‘Be elect or be damned,’ he says to us all. Names aren’t important; but, anyhow, it was Fate that led me here.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t me?” she asked softly. “Are you sure I wasn’t calling you, and you had to come?”
“Well, it was en route, anyhow; and you are always calling, if I must tell you,” he laughed. Suddenly he became grave. “I hear you call me in the night sometimes, and I start up and say ‘Yes, Di!’ out of my sleep. It’s a queer hallucination. I’ve got you on the brain, certainly.”
“It seems to vex you—certainly,” she said, opening the book that lay in her lap, “and your eyes trouble me to-day. They’ve got a look that used to be in them, Flood, before—before you promised; and another look I don’t understand and don’t like. I suppose it’s always so. The real business of life is trying to understand each other.”
“You have wonderful thoughts for one that’s had so little chance,” he said. “That’s because you’re a genius, I suppose. Teaching can’t give that sort of thing—the insight.”
“What is the matter, Flood?” she asked suddenly again, her breast heaving, her delicate, rounded fingers interlacing. “I heard a man say once that you were ‘as deep as the sea.’ He did not mean it kindly, but I do. You are in trouble, and I want to share it if I can. Where were you going when you came across me here?”
“To see old Busby, the quack-doctor up there,” he answered, nodding towards a shrubbed and wooded hillock behind them.
“Old Busby!” she rejoined in amazement. “What do you want with him—not medicine of that old quack, that dreadful man?”