She could see herself tramping after him like a squaw after a chief on rabbiting expeditions—dozens of pictures like this, but none of them sentimental. She had never thought of marriage till the day she received a letter from Dick, asking her to marry him; to which she replied by writing half a dozen letters refusing him, which letters she tore up one after the other, and then wrote a seventh accepting him, which she posted.
Now one of the worst evils in an accepted proposal of marriage is this. That directly they hear of it, the girl’s relations, male and female, take their implements—nets, ferrets, and so on—and go off rabbiting in your past.
Dick had not much of a past as far as size goes, but it was well stocked with game for hunters such as these.
So well stocked that old Mr. Deering, a retired London wine merchant who had taken a country seat in Scotland, near Glenbruach, put his foot down and forbade Jane to have anything more to do with her cousin: an order which would have driven her straight into his arms, had not the unfortunate Dick, hearing of the inquisition that had been made, come North inflamed with rage and whisky.
Men drank harder even in the ‘eighties than they do now, and Scotland was never the home of abstinence; yet the scene Dick Leslie created in Callander went beyond the bounds of even Scottish convention, and utterly destroyed any chance of his marriage with Jane du Telle.
Remembering his description of the affair which he gave to M’Gourley on the Nikko road, you will agree with me that he was not a man who viewed his own acts—well, as others viewed them.
In this, however, he was by no means singular.
Jane, sitting on her bed and biting the corner of her handkerchief, was at the same time looking back over the past. She was a person with an infinite capacity for affection, with no capacity at all for a Grand Passion. Her life was made up of a bundle of petty interests, and her history was the history of a pure and somewhat commonplace soul.
She had loved Dick as a brother in the past, and now that he had come into her life again after all those years (even after that terrible scene long ago), bringing with him so much from the happy days that were for ever gone, her heart went out to him as it had never gone to human being before.
And to-morrow she must say good-bye to him, and never, perhaps, see him again.