He paused, hoping she would say something, but Lily said nothing. She had covered her face with her hands.
“I have been beginning to think,” he continued slowly, “that this is a bad time for beginning life in Edinburgh. You are not ignorant of Edinburgh life, Lily; you know that in the vacations, when the courts are up, nobody is there. If we had twenty houses, we could not stay in them in August and September, when every-body is away. As this is a bad time for beginning in Edinburgh, I was thinking that to take the expense of a house upon me now would be a foolish thing. Think of a garret in the old town from this to autumn, with all the smoke and the bad air instead of the bonnie moor! And in six weeks or a little more, Lily, I would be able to get some shooting hereabouts, which will be a grand excuse, and we could be together without a word said, with nobody to make any criticisms.”
She cried out, stamping her foot: “Will you never understand? It is the grand excuse and the nobody to criticise that is insufferable to me. Why should there be any excuse? Why should there be a word said? I am your wife, Ronald Lumsden!”
“My dear, you are ill to please,” he said. “But nobody can see reason better than you if you will but open your eyes to it. See here, Lily: two months and more are coming when our house, if we had it, would be useless to us, and in the meantime you are very well off here.”
She gave him a sudden glance, and would have said something, but arrested herself in time.
“You are very well here,” he repeated, “far better than even going upon visits, or at some other little country place, where we might take lodgings, and be very uncomfortable. Your moor is a little estate to you, Lily; it’s company and every thing. And if I had a little shooting which I could manage—a man with a gun is not hard to place in Scotland, and up in the north country there is many an opportunity; and there is always Tom Robison’s cottage to fall back on, where you are very well off as long as you neither need to eat there nor to sleep there. Your servants here are used to me. Whatever explanations Dougal has made to himself, he has made them long ago. I have no fears for him. Where would you be so well, my Lily, as in your home?”
“And where would you be so ill, Ronald,” she cried, “as in—as in——” But Lily could not finish the sentence. How could it be that he did not say that to himself, that he left it to her to say—to her, who was incapable, after all, of saying to the man she loved such hard words? Her own home, her uncle’s house, who had sent her here to separate her once for all from Ronald Lumsden, while Ronald arranged so easily to establish himself under his enemy’s roof.
“Where would I be so ill as in Sir Robert’s house?” he said, with a laugh. “On the contrary, Lily, I am very happy here. I have been happier here than in any other house in the world, and why should I set up scruples, my dear, when I have none? If Sir Robert had been a wise man he never would have tried to separate you and me; and now that we have turned his evil to good, and made his prison a palace, why should we banish ourselves when all is done to do him a very doubtful pleasure? He will never hear a word of it in my belief, and if he does, he will hear far more than that I have come to share your castle for another vacation. It was the first step that was the worst: yon snow-storm, perhaps, at the New Year; but that was the power of circumstances, and no Scots householder would ever have turned a man out into the snow. When we did that, we did the worst. A few weeks, more or less, after that—what can it matter? And, short time or long time, it is my belief, Lily, that he will never be a pin the wiser. Then why should we trouble ourselves?” Ronald said.
As for Lily, this time she answered not a word.