While he was reading it he gave Sandy the rod, and Sandy was grateful to the man who had written a letter (surely a woman it must have been) that took three distinct readings to its proper digestion. If a man were a true Christian—and all fishermen should be that, for the earliest of all Christians were fishermen before anything else—he would give the rod oftener to the gillie who stands beside him, knowing himself to be by far the better fisherman of the two. For hours he stands there with that certain knowledge biting into his heart.
If Marcus had told Sandy all that lay in his heart, Sandy would have been profoundly interested, no doubt, because he had had cause, in his time, to think of women as interfering creatures—and of small use in a world of God-fearing men. There were exceptions, he would have allowed, and he would have instanced the one now driving along the road behind them.
“Yon’s Mrs. Scott,” he said to Marcus.
“Where?” And Marcus’s eyes, following the direction of Sandy’s finger, saw a lady driving two ponies in a low phaeton. She pulled up the ponies and, getting out of the carriage, came over the heather towards Marcus. Marcus again handed the rod to Sandy and went to meet Mrs. Scott: Sandy would not have minded if Mr. Maitland had gone to Heaven—just for a wee bittie, while he, Sandy, fished the pool as it should be fished—on earth.
Mrs. Scott was a gentle, mild, little woman and she looked much happier in the heather she loved than she had looked in the ballroom, in London, she had not loved. And the tweed hat, pulled down over her eyes, was infinitely more becoming to her than the tiara had been.
“Any luck?” she asked.
“None. Sandy thinks I’m a poor fisherman.”
She smiled: Sandy possibly was right, but that shouldn’t count against Mr. Maitland as a man.
It was then Mrs. Scott said how kind Marcus had been in subscribing so generously to the cottage hospital, and Marcus said: “Not at all.”
“I was so glad,” went on Mrs. Scott, “to see your niece at the Sale—it was so good of her to come. I remember her so well at the dance that night—you remember?”