“We will change the subject, if you don’t mind.” The tone revealed a wide gulf between the outlook of Eliza Kelly and that of a confidential retainer in the household of the Duke of Bridport.
“Very well, my dear. But don’t bite. Have the last piece of muffin. And then I’ll toast another for Constable Maclean.”
II
The clock on the chimney-piece struck five. Before its last echo had died there came a loud knock on the front door.
Constable Maclean was a ruddy young Scotsman. He was tall, lean, large-boned, with prominent teeth and ears. Although freckled like a turkey’s egg, he was not a bad-looking fellow. His boots, however, took up a lot of space in a small room, and the manner of his entrance suggested that the difficult operation known as “falling over oneself” was in the act of consummation. But there was an intense earnestness in his manner, and a personal force in his look, which gave a redeeming grace of character to a shy awkwardness, verging on the grotesque.
“Good afternune,” said Constable Maclean, removing his helmet with a polite grimace.
One of the ladies shook hands, the other welcomed the young man with a cordial good-evening and bade him sit down. Constable Maclean, encumbered with a regulation overcoat, sat down rather like a performing bear.
At first conversation languished. Yet no welcome could have been more cordial than Eliza’s. She felt like a mother to this young man. It was her nature to feel like a mother to every young man. Moreover, Dugald Maclean, as he sat perspiring with nervousness on the edge of a chair much too small for him, seemed to need some large-hearted woman to feel like a mother towards him.
Miss Harriet Sanderson was to blame, no doubt, for the young policeman’s aphasia. Her coolness and ease, with a half quizzical, half ironical look surmounting it, seemed to increase the bashfulness of Dugald Maclean whenever he ventured to look at her out of the tail of his eye.
It was clear that the young man was suffering acutely. Nature had intended him to be expansive—not in the Sassenach sense perhaps,—but given the time and the place and a right conjunction of the planets, Dugald Maclean had social gifts, at least they were so assessed at Carrickmachree in his native Caledonia. Moreover, he was rather proud of them. He was an ambitious and gifted young police officer. For many moons he had been looking forward to this romantic hour. Since a first chance meeting with the semi-divine Miss Sanderson he had been living in the hope of a second, yet now by the courtesy of Providence it was granted to him he might never have seen a woman before.