“What smoke-room?”
“Of the hotel. I was havin’ a crack wi’ her husband day-fore yesterday, and in she come to speak a word to him; and I know wummen—and, weel, I know, fixed between that chap with a head like a blazin’ whin-bush and you, which way she’ll run.”
“I wish you wouldn’t be such a fool,” said Leslie, now really annoyed and therefore keeping himself in check; “she’s nothing to me.”
Mac turned, and under his bushy, half-grizzled eyebrows stared in Leslie’s face, and Leslie did not support his gaze, but turned away irritably, and flung stones at a brown hawk that was circling in the air before them.
Mac got up, tapped the ashes out of his pipe, and made off.
“See ye the morn?” he called back as he got to the gate.
“Maybe,” said Leslie, looking at his watch and rising to go into the house.
He went down at ten, and shortly after his departure, out came Campanula, a basket in her hand and sandals on her feet, for the weather was dry. She came along the path towards the cherry trees, examining the ground and the interstices of the bushes.
At last she saw what she wanted, a bluebell.
She plucked it with tender care and put it in her basket, then she saw another and treated it the same, and another; so went she on till it became perfectly plain that her object was not gardening, or the gathering of a bunch of flowers, but the extermination of every bluebell on the premises.