Mr. McPherson was not one who minced matters at all, but called a spade a spade when he knew it was one. He had heard his brother say many times that the artist had been most happy in getting the right expression in Nannie’s eyes, and that the eyes of the girl seen on the beach were like them. He fancied, too, that Sandy had said she was small, like Nannie, and yet here was this tall blonde, with eyes as blue as the waters of Loch Katrine among the heather hills of Scotland, presented as Miss Burdick. The Miss Burdick, of course—Rex’s fiancée, if he would have it so. No look in her eyes like Nannie. No look like Nannie anywhere in her face. But in the great gray eyes of the other, there was certainly a strong resemblance to Nannie. He knew that look too well to be mistaken. He had seen it for years in the girlish face of his brother’s first love, and he expected to find it in Irene, instead of Rena, whom he would have selected as the great-step-granddaughter, had he made his choice unaided. Hence his question, “Are you both relatives of Nannie?”
Both Irene and Rena were puzzled, and it was Irene who replied, “We must have the same ancestors on one side of our family, as we are cousins, but I never heard of Nannie till I came here.”
“Nor I,” Rena said, “although it seems to me as if I had heard of some relative away back who drowned herself like Nannie. Aunt Mary may know. I’ll write and ask her. Am I really like the picture? I shall be so glad to see it.”
“You are very like it, dimples and all,” Mr. McPherson said, looking admiringly at her, while Irene began to grow hot with envy and anger which she had the tact to conceal.
It would never do to show her chagrin to this shrewd man, whose keen eyes made her so uncomfortable.
“I’ll have to win Rex through him,” she thought, and never was her voice softer, nor her smile sweeter than during the half hour she sat chatting with Colin, who asked her at last if, while she was abroad, she visited Scotland?
“Oh, Scotland!” she exclaimed, remembering that he was Scotch, “Certainly, I did; and the memory of it is a joy forever.”
Colin was delighted and said next:
“And Glasgow, where I was born—did you go there?”
Just for an instant Irene hesitated. Of all the cities visited in Europe, Glasgow was the one she liked the least. She had been there but two days—one of which was rainy—and in that time she saw more squalor and hard faces in the streets among the poor than she had ever seen before in her life, to say nothing of three street fights, one between a girl and a newsboy directly in front of the hotel. She disliked Glasgow and was glad to leave it, but it would not do to decry Colin’s native city, which she assured him she enjoyed so much, especially the parks and drives. In short, Glasgow was charming, and Scotland still more so.