He stopped short and the blood rushed over his face.
"Well," said Mona quietly, "as a what?"
"Milliner," he said, kicking a stone violently out of his way, in a tempest of anger at his own stupidity.
"You don't mean to say," said Mona, "that you were afraid of hurting my feelings? Oh, please give me credit for having the soul of a human being!"
He walked with her to her own door that night. It was after dark, to be sure, but I am inclined to think that he might have done the same had it been noonday; and when he got home he asked his aunt no more questions about "Miss Simpson's niece."
CHAPTER XVI.
"JOHN HOGG'S MACHINE."
"He is curiously simpatico," said Mona to herself the next morning. "I don't know that I ever knew any one with whom I felt less necessity for clearing up my fog-beswathed utterances, or for breaking down my brilliant metaphors in milk; it is pleasant to be able to walk straight off into the eternals with somebody; but I like a man to be more of a healthy animal." And a sunshiny memory passed through her mind of the "moral Antiseptic," the dear brotherly Sahib.
"I wonder who the other botanist was?" she went on presently, tumbling her pillows into a more comfortable position. "The Professor's assistant perhaps, or possibly a professor himself. He certainly was a scientist, every inch of him, from his silent tongue to the tips of his ill-groomed fingers."
It would have surprised her not a little if she could have seen the subject of her speculations an hour or so later. He was sitting behind the counter of a draper's shop in Kilwinnie, his head resting on his hand in an attitude of the deepest dejection. Mona was perfectly right when she declared him to be every inch a scientist; he was more so perhaps than even the great Professor himself: but the lines had fallen unto him in a narrow little world, where his studies were looked upon as mere vagaries, on a par with kite-making and bullet-casting; where his college classes at St Rules had to be paid for out of his own carefully saved pocket-money; where his experiments and researches had to be conducted in a tumble-down summer-house at the foot of the old garden; and where, at the age of twenty, he was left an orphan with four grown-up sisters to support.