“Don’t you like books?”
“Hate the sight of ’em! Especially on a holiday. Never want to see as much as a line of print from the time I leave home to the time I return. Especially,”—his eyes twinkled in the mischievous manner to which exception had just been taken—“especially poetry! Don’t mind my saying so, do you?”
“Not a bit,” returned Margot promptly, tossing her first stone into the lake with a vehemence which held more than a suspicion of temper. “Of course I never—one would never—expect you to like it. It would be the last thing one would expect—”
“Too fat?”
She blushed at that, and had the grace to look a trifle distressed.
“Oh, not that altogether. It’s a ‘Je ne sais quoi,’ don’t you know. One could tell at a glance that you were not a literary man.”
The Chieftain chuckled, bent down to gather a handful of stones, and raised a red smiling face to hers.
“Well, well, we can’t all be geniuses, you know! One in a glen is about as much as you can expect to meet in these hard times. But I can chuck stones with the best of ’em. That one was a good dozen yards beyond your last throw. Put your back into it, and see what you can do. It’s a capital way of letting off steam.”
Margot was tempted to protest against the accusation, but reflection prompted silence, since after all she was cross, and there was no denying it.
She took the little man’s advice, and “let off steam” by the vigour and determination with which she hurled pebbles into the lake, making them skim along the surface in professional manner for an ever longer and longer space before finally disappearing from sight.