He floundered on into the midst of excuses, and her embarrassment had time to pass away, with it the blush on her face, and he felt as if a sun had somewhere set.
"Thank you" (she was all sedateness now) "I fear that Principal Trenholme is suffering very much from his foot and will be kept in for some time. If you had told me that you had repeated my unjust speeches I should have asked you to take some apology, to say that I am quite willing to acknowledge my own—unreasonableness."
He saw that this speech was intended to cover all the ground, and that he was desired to impart as much of the apology as he believed to be needed, and no more. He remembered now that he had intended to plead Robert's cause, but could think of nothing to say except—
"Robert is—Robert really is an awfully good man."
This he said so suddenly and so earnestly looking at her, that she was betrayed into an unintended answer.
"Is he?" And then in a moment she smiled on him again, and said warmly,
"He certainly is if you say that; a brother knows as no one else can."
She was treating him like a boy again. He did not like it now because he had felt the sweetness of having her at an advantage. There are some men who, when they see what they want, stretch out their hands to take it with no more complexity of thought than a baby has when it reaches for a toy. At other times Alec Trenholme might consider; just then he only knew that he wanted to talk longer with this stately girl who was now retiring. He arrested her steps by making a random dash at the first question that might detain her.
There was much that, had he known his own mind clearly and how to express it, he would have liked to say to her. Deep down within him he was questioning whether it was possible always to live under such impulse of fealty to Heaven as had befallen him under the exciting influence of Cameron's expectation, whether the power of such an hour to sift the good from the evil, the important from the unimportant in life, could in any wise be retained. But he would have been a wholly different man from what he was had he thought this concisely, or said it aloud. All that he did was to express superficial curiosity concerning the sentiments of others, and to express it inanely enough.
"Do you think," he said, "that all those poor people—my brother's housekeeper, for instance—do you think they really thought—really expected—"
"I think—" she said. (She came back to the fence and clasped her hands upon it in her interest.) "Don't you think, Mr. Trenholme, that a person who is always seeking the Divine Presence, lives in it and has power to make other people know that it is near? But then, you see, these others fancy they must model their seeking upon the poor vagaries of their teacher. We are certain that the treasure is found, but—we mix up things so, things are really so mixed, that we suppose we must shape our ideas upon the earthen vessel that holds it. I don't know whether I have said what I mean, or if you understand—" she stopped.