"There are certain things, Mr. Stepaside, that one cannot deny, not that they are true, but because it is impossible for one to take notice of them!"
"Forgive me," he said, almost humbly, "if I have believed what I have so often been told, but if there is one person about whom I am sensitive, it is my mother. I will not detain you any longer, Miss Bolitho. Perhaps it would have been better if I had not spoken to you at all. Do not think that I complain because you are fighting against me. You can do no other—besides, I am sure"—and here he spoke bitterly—"that your father and the Wilsons will have poisoned your mind against me!"
He saw an angry flash from her eyes.
"I am afraid you are wrong there, Mr. Stepaside, as far as I know there have been no reasons why I should think of you at all; as for enmity, such a thing would be impossible!"
His heart seemed like a great hot fire as he left her. He knew he had broken all conventions, and acted like a madman; he knew that whatever she had felt towards him before, her feelings towards him now must be of utter scorn and derision, and yet he would not recall one word he had spoken, even if he could. He was glad that he had said these wild, incoherent things to her. He had spoken to her, she had spoken to him. In the future she would think of him, not as a nonentity, not as someone who could be easily passed by, but as one whose life meant something. She would never be able to forget him. He knew it and rejoiced in it! She would be reminded of him by a thousand things in the days to come. She would never be indifferent about him again, and throughout the whole of the contest that was coming on she would regard him differently from the way in which she had thought of him before. Somehow, too, he felt less jealous of Ned Wilson. He had not spoken of this man, who was said to be his rival, but he was in the background of his thoughts all the time. For weeks the stories which the gossips had bandied had wounded him, but now he felt different. After their talk this girl would never think of Ned Wilson; she could not. He did not belong to her order of beings. He breathed a different atmosphere, he spoke a different language, lived in a different world.
The next day Paul started for Scotland, to try and discover the truth concerning which his mother had told him.
CHAPTER VI
PAUL GOES TO SCOTLAND
When Mary Bolitho returned to Howden Clough that evening she went straight to her own room. She wanted to be alone. Under ordinary circumstances she would have, girl-like, sought out her friend, Emily Wilson, and given her a full report of what had taken place, but her desire was for silence rather than for speech. In spite of her anger she felt that there was something sacred in what this young man had said to her. There could be no doubt that he felt strongly, and she knew, by the tones of his voice and the look in his eyes, that he was greatly moved. Of course, she felt indignant that he should dare to speak to her at all, and she wondered why she had resolved to say nothing to her father about their meeting. When all allowances had been made, he had been rude in the extreme. He had stopped her in a lonely part of the countryside, and had roughly commanded her to listen to him! And Mary Bolitho was a proud girl, and was not accustomed to being dictated to. All the same, she felt much interested in what he had said, and she found herself thinking of him again and again. There was something romantic, too, in his story which, in spite of its improbability, she could not help believing, and although she felt very angry with him, she sympathised with the feelings he had expressed. Months before she had been annoyed at the thought that her father should have been opposed by one who was little removed from the working classes. She remembered him as she had first seen him, at the shop in Market Street, pale, angry, and, as it seemed to her, coarse. He spoke as one of his own class, too, and he was rough and rude. But that view had become somewhat corrected, and she had to admit to herself that Paul Stepaside was no awkward, ignorant, ill-dressed clown. Indeed, for that matter, he had the advantage of most young men of her acquaintance. His coal-black eyes and hair, his pale face and stalwart figure, would be noticed anywhere. Besides, he was well-dressed, and although he knew but little of the ways of her world, she knew that he would never be passed without notice. Besides all this, there was a suggestion of strength in nearly every word he said, in every tone of his voice, and Mary Bolitho had a great admiration for strong men. Young Edward Wilson, whose pointed attentions she could not mistake, seemed but as a pigmy compared with him. Still, she felt angry, and she rejoiced in the thought that, on his own admission, she was helping towards his defeat.