Father Duggan had been the lender of Canon Cheyne’s Commentary on the Psalms, which he had just reviewed for a daily paper.
“I won’t pretend that I read the whole of it,” said S. J.-B. in returning the volumes. “In fact”—with a sparkle of mischief,—“I noticed when it came that only about a quarter of the leaves were cut.”
“Yes,” he admitted tranquilly. “I did think of cutting a few more before sending it up to you,—but I didn’t.”
“Ah, no!” she said. “You were an honest man.”
She was on excellent terms, too, with the local doctors: they looked forward to a chat when they met her in the country lanes, and, if, when she left Edinburgh, there had been any hatchet left to bury, their boyish camaraderie would soon have compelled her to bury it. “I confess I had a prejudice against women doctors,” one of them said after her death, “but she disarmed me completely.”
The life at Windydene was not unbroken. The clay soil in that wooded garden was not conducive to the health of a rheumatic person like S. J.-B., so several brief winters were spent at various places on the Riviera, and one in Portugal, mainly in the Sacred Forest at Bussaco. At Carqueiranne in Provence one of the editors of the Matin was a fellow guest, and he proved another unexpected comrade. It must have been a matter of some surprise to him to meet in that unlikely place, an elderly English gentlewoman with a grasp of the range of European politics and a facility for discussing it in excellent French.
It was at Carqueiranne that she and the intimate friend of those days met Mr. Frederic Myers and Professor William James, and here too there was a pleasant partie carrée for some days with Professor and Mrs. Gardiner who were on a cycling tour in the south of France. Professor Gardiner had several times been S. J.-B.’s guest in Edinburgh, when his researches brought him north to inspect some unique document among the archives there, and it was a pleasant change to meet when both were in purely holiday mood.
In the late Autumn of 1909—in spite of increasing physical disqualifications—she made a last driving tour to her beloved Yarrow.
It is needless to say that she never lost her interest in the happenings of the world. She had latterly a profound distrust of Germany, and was an eager reader of the articles on this subject in the National Review. The Riddle of the Sands was a novel that she helped to circulate widely. Her name appeared pretty frequently in the correspondence columns of the Times, sometimes in connection with Woman Suffrage, more often in unavailing protest against the endless “joy-riding”—degenerating into the sheer lawlessness of the “road-hog”—that was making the loveliest English lanes a nightmare of dust and danger.