“I would not have gone had I been you,” she said. “I would have let old Charlie do his nasty errands for himself.”
Fanshawe laughed with some conscious shame, feeling indeed that he had been somewhat weak; and the old lady resumed—
“Nobody thinks the more of you for being too kind. A willing horse is aye over-ridden; but that’s not all. In this world folk take you at your own word, Mr. Fanshawe. They think little of a man that holds himself cheap. It’s no advantage—either with man or woman. The best thing ye can do is to let folk see that a favour from you is a real favour, not easy to get, not given to everybody—”
“Miss Jean, you speak like Solomon himself,” said Fanshawe, with mock reverence and real confusion, “or rather like the Queen of Sheba,—which is the next wisest, I suppose.”
“Maybe I am like the Queen of Sheba,” said Miss Jean; “but it’s men far from Solomon that I’ve come to see. You like Fife, I suppose, Mr. Fanshawe, that I find you back here?”
“I suppose so too,” he said, with a rueful comic sense that he was by no means a free agent, “since you find me here, Miss Jean—as you say—”
“You should not repeat another person’s words, it’s not civil. And yet Fife has but small attractions for a young man. You’re fond of golf, I suppose, like all the rest?”
“Probably I might be,” he said, laughing, “if I had the chance; but I have never tried yet—”
“Oh, then you’re one of those archæ-somethings, that make the old stones speak?” said Miss Jean. “Oh, but the like of me could make them speak better, if we were to tell all we mind and all we have seen.”
“I am not an archæ-anything,” said Fanshawe.