Marion had made up her mind to say no more. But when Grace Petrie, tossing her head and laughing, said that she could guess who the exception might be, she changed her mind again.
“Well!” said Hugh, drawing still near as she receded. “‘Except, perhaps,’ whom?”
“I except no one that ever I saw, for there is no one that ever I saw who, in all things—in mind, body, and estate, as you say—I would think fit for Miss Dawson. But what I was going to say was—except, perhaps—George—only he is her brother, ye ken.”
“George!” echoed, many voices.
“And what’s George more than another?” asked Jack scornfully. “She’ll be saying next, that there’s naebody like him in all Scotland.”
And then Marion, glancing up at the window beneath which they had been sitting, met the wondering look of Mr Dawson.
“He must have heard every word,” said Grace in a whisper.
Marion turned and fled to seek comfort with Miss Jean.
They went away to the Castle, and Miss Dawson went with them; Captain Harefield came to the house soon after they set out, but he did not follow them, though Mr Dawson suggested that he might easily overtake them before they reached the place. It was Mr Dawson himself he had come to see; and when they all came back, and the young folk had had their tea and were gone home together in the moonlight, her father had something to say to Jean.
“It’s a comfort that you can just leave it to Jean herself,” said his sister, when he told his news to her. Of what her own opinion might be she said nothing, nor was she curious to hear what Mr Dawson might think now about the chance that his daughter had of becoming the wife of Captain Harefield. “It is a thing that she must decide for herself; and indeed she will let no one else decide it.”