The summer sun was warm, and Margaret wore a floppy leghorn hat which threw a most becoming shade over her serious grey eyes; eyes with long black lashes in somewhat startling contrast to her very fair hair. Mr. Wycherly particularly admired her Greek profile, her short upper lip, the lovely oval of her cheek and chin. Still more did he appreciate her sweet consideration and gentleness; and for the first time since he came to live in Scotland he found himself wishing that he knew something of this nephew who so plainly occupied a prominent position in the thoughts of this kind and beautiful girl.
"Of course," Mr. Wycherly remarked guardedly, "he is perfectly right to earn his own living in the way that seems best to him, though whether it was absolutely necessary to run counter to the prejudices of his relatives in order to do so is not quite clear."
"But you would not, would you, look down on anyone just because he happened to be in trade? If he is a cultured gentleman already, his being in trade can't make him less of a cultured gentleman, can it?"
"Of course not," Mr. Wycherly agreed, "but I think I can understand, perhaps, some slight reason for annoyance on the part of his people. You see, had he announced earlier this extreme desire to go into business, it is hardly likely that they would have given him an expensive education at the University. He was, you tell me, five years at Oxford?"
"He didn't waste his time there," Margaret answered eagerly, "he took all sorts of honours: but he loathes teaching—" Margaret stopped, for Mr. Wycherly was looking at her with a curiously amused expression which seemed to say, "How is it that you are so remarkably conversant with the likes and dislikes of this young man?"
She leant over the wall to gather some of the big horse gowans that grew in the field, so that her face was hidden from Mr. Wycherly. She fastened a little bunch of them into her waistband; then she said in the detached tone of one who seeks for information merely from curiosity:
"Don't you think that at some time or other one has to settle what to do with one's life, regardless of whether it is pleasing to other people or not—I mean in very big and important things?"
Mr. Wycherly, who thought she was still referring to his nephew, cordially agreed that for most of us such a course at some time or other is a necessity.
As it happened, however, Bonnie Margaret was not talking of his nephew, but of herself. Mr. Wycherly remembered this in the following October when, Lady Alicia having removed her household to Edinburgh, a startling rumour shook the village to its very foundations—a rumour to the effect that Bonnie Margaret had one night "taken the train" and was married next morning to somebody in the south of England.
Miss Esperance was much shocked and perturbed, the more so that she felt it devolved upon her, and her alone, to break this agitating intelligence to Mr. Wycherly. For was not a relative of his own the chief culprit? Miss Esperance could never understand Mr. Wycherly's indifference toward everything that concerned his relations.