"It came off wonderfully well, considering that I went in search of it," thought Dudley. "I fully expected it to be a dead failure. She must have met the draper accidentally."
"He is very gentlemanly and amazingly clever," thought Rachel; "and he seemed as pleased at the meeting as any of us. But how my legs do ache!"
"I'll no more of this masquerading!" thought Mona. "I will take the first opportunity of asking Rachel's permission to tell him the whole truth. Perhaps he will take it all as a matter of course."
But when she went up to dinner the next day, Rachel calmly informed her that Dr Dudley had gone. "He has just walked up to the station with a bag in his hand," she said, "and Bill had a lot of luggage on a hurley. I think it's a queer sort of thing that he didn't look in and say good-bye, after we were all so friendly-like yesterday."
Mona smiled a little drearily.
"He might well say 'so long,'" she said to herself, an hour later, as she sat on the battlements of Castle Maclean. "Looked at in the abstract, as a period of time, three months is a pretty fair sample of the commodity!"
Thus does, the feminine mind, while striving to grasp the abstract, fall back inevitably into the concrete!
"As a man," said Mona, "he is not a patch upon the Sahib; but I never had such a playfellow in my life!"