“I really want to tell you Ralph St. Jermyn arrives to-morrow. You know why I expect you to be interested? I have not forgotten how interested he seemed that night. Does she care, do you think?”
“I cannot tell whether my niece cares for any one or not—there are several.”
“Of course there must be, but Ralph is so—”
“Yes, I know, but she must do as she wishes—”
“Of course—I only thought—perhaps, hoped—I was very sleepy that night. I forget much of what happened.”
Marcus was relieved to hear it.
“You were very kind to me, I remember. I am so insignificant in a ballroom, I generally go to sleep: but people are very kind; some one always tells me when it’s time to wake up—but here I count and I like it. I am thankful to be noticed by any one in London, but here people are bound to notice me,”—and the little woman laughed. “I stand out. The biggest gillie runs to do my bidding, and I love them all—gillies, women, children; lairds too—all of them; and my one hope is that my Sheila may meet some good man soon and marry him at once, so that I may never have to go to London again. Will you tell your niece how kind she was the other day at the bazaar? But she ran away too soon. I am afraid these things bore young people, although my party were very long-suffering—I am a fearful ogre, I fear.”
Marcus turned and looked at her: a little speck of kind humanity she seemed in a vast sea of heather. At her feet, heather; behind her, heather; before her, the rushing river; above her, the blue sky; encircling her on all sides, hills, hills, hills.
“It’s good to be alive—it’s a good world,” she said, but Marcus was not so sure that it was. His days were spent without Diana, and his evenings with Pease and Watkins; while Hastings talked to Diana about her father. It was quite impossible, he knew, that there should be so much to say about any one man, and now to add to it all another man was coming who would also talk to Diana—of many things.