"That I don't!" she answered warmly. "The first women, who were determined not merely to creep in themselves but to open up the way for others, must have suffered obloquy and persecution from all but the very few, at any time. If the lives of a little band of women—I had almost said if the life of one woman—could be blotted out, I wonder how many of us would have the courage to stand where we now do? It is a pretty and a wonderful sight, perhaps, to see a band of young girls treading the uphill path and singing as they go. 'How easy it is,' they say, 'and how sweet we make it with our flowers!' No doubt they do, and heaven bless them for it! But it has always seemed to me that the bit of eternal work was the making of the road."
She spoke with so much earnestness that the Sahib was almost uneasy.
"That is more than true," he said warmly. "It is the working of a universal principle. You know," he added shyly, "if you were, going to take to a public life, I wonder you did not think of the platform."
"The platform!" Mona laughed merrily. "If you put me on the platform with an audience in front of me, I should do what a fellow-student tells me she did on receipt of my last letter—'sit on the floor and howl'!"
They both laughed. This anti-climax brought them comfortably down to everyday life again, and they talked about pleasant nothings for the rest of the way.
"Look here, Dickinson," said Sir Douglas, when they entered the hotel; "I won't have you walking off with Mona for a whole day together. She is my property. Do you hear?"
"I am sure it was I who discovered her on the hillside,"
Mona held up her finger protestingly.
"Oh, I am Sir Douglas's invention, without a doubt," she said, putting her hand affectionately within her uncle's arm; "you only rediscovered me accidentally. What a pity it is that every great invention cannot speak for itself and give honest men their due!"
The Sahib was very silent as he sat in the smoking-room that evening. He held a newspaper before him, for he did not wish to be disturbed; but he was not reading.