Had they all lived thirty years later, or in a less secluded part of the world, the sisters would probably have looked out for themselves, and have left their brother to make a great name, or to starve in a garret over his weeds and his beetles, according as the Fates might decree; but such an idea never occurred to any one of the five, although the sisters had all received sufficient instruction in music, painting, and French, to make them rather hard to please in the matter of husbands.
The lad was cut out for patient, laborious, scientific research, and he knew it; but with four sisters on one's hands, and a balance at the bank scarcely large enough to meet doctor's bills and funeral expenses, scientific research seems sadly vague and indefinite, while a well-established drapery business is at least "something to lippen to."
So he laid aside his plans, and took up the yardstick as a mere matter of course, without any posing and protestations even to himself.
He so far asserted himself, that the microscope, the hortus siccus, and the neat pine-wood cabinets, took up a place of honour in the house, instead of skulking in out-of-the-way corners; but now that fifteen years had passed away, although he was known to all the initiated as the greatest living authority on the fauna and flora of the eastern part of the county, he was beginning to pursue his hobby at rarer intervals and in a more dilettante spirit. Now and then when some great scientist came into the neighbourhood, and appealed to him as to the habitat of this and as to the probable extinction of that, when his personal convoy on an expedition was looked upon as an honour and a great piece of luck, when in the course of walks round the coast he drank in the new theories of which the scientific world was talking, he felt some return of the old fire; but in the main, to the great relief of his sisters, he was settling down into a good and useful burgher, with a place on the town council and on sundry local boards, with an excellent prospect of the provostship, and with no time for such frivolities as butterfly-hunting and botanising.
When his acquaintances questioned him, he always stated his conviction that he had chosen, on the whole, the better part; but he never gave any account of hours like the present, in which he loathed the very thought of civic honours and dignity, and in which he painted to himself in glowing colours the life that might have been.
He was thinking much just now of the burly old professor whose visit he had keenly enjoyed; and more even than of the professor he was thinking of Mona Maclean. All things are relative in life. Scores of men had met Mona who had scarcely looked at her a second time. She might be nothing and nobody in the great bright world of London; but into this man's dark and lonely life she had come like a meteor. He could scarcely have told what it was that had fascinated him. It was partly her bright young face, though he dreaded good-looking women; partly her light-hearted song, though he scorned frivolous women; partly her botany, though he laughed at learned women; and partly her frank outspoken manner, though he hated forward women. She bore no smallest resemblance to the mental picture that had sometimes floated vaguely before him of a possible helpmeet for him; and yet, and yet—look where he would, he could see her sitting on that rock, with all the light of the dancing waves in her eyes,—the veritable spirit of the coast as the professor had said. He even found himself trying to hum in a very uncertain bass,
"For he's going to marry Yum-Yum;"
but this was a reductio ad absurdum, and with a heavy frown he proceeded to make out some bills.
It never occurred to him to question that she was far out of his reach. Anybody, he thought, could see at a glance that she was a lady, in a different sense from that in which his sisters bore the name. It was right and fitting that the great professor should give her his card, but who was he—the draper of Kilwinnie—that he should suggest another meeting?
But the second meeting was nearer than either he or Mona anticipated.