“What is the name of that hill?” she asked, all at once coming to one of those sudden pauses. “That?” said Archie, anxiously turning to quite another point; “oh that is Ben Ros—or no, I think it is what they call The Miller—if it is not Ros-dhu.”
“You don’t seem to know very much about them,” said the stately girl, and then she set off again, certainly indifferent to the blundering explanation he made that he was afraid he had a bad memory, and that one person said one thing and one another, so that it was difficult to know. At another time it was on the seaside that Rosamond paused, demanding to know the name of the lighthouse in the distance, and what was the shadowy height to be seen far off down the course of the Clyde. If it had cost him his life, poor Archie could not remember whether he had been told that this peak was Goatfell or if it was one of the Cumbraes, which he knew lay “that way.” And the light: what was it that Roderick called the light? If he had ever dreamt that he would be interrogated this way, Archie would have given his whole attention to the acquisition of local knowledge. A cold perspiration came out upon his forehead, as he stammered out answers which he was sure were all wrong. “Oh!” said Miss Saumarez, not even deigning to cast a glance at him. Eddy did not suffer half so much from his unsuccessful examination as poor Archie did from this totally unexpected process, which showed him the profound depth of his ignorance. What a fool she must think him! What an idiot he was!
“I am afraid, Mr. Rowland, you don’t admire your own country so much as I do,” Rosamond said at the end of the walk, with a smile that went over his head like an arrow, which she did not even take the trouble to aim at him. And he was tongue-tied and could not say a word, could not think of anything to say; though after she had gone on, a dozen little darts of words which he might have said, came into his mind, wounding himself with little pricks instead of compelling her to respect him a little, as, if they had but come soon enough, they might have done.
Meanwhile the other pair had got on, as Eddy would have said, like a house on fire. Marion had given him the whole history of the ball at Eagle’s Craig, to which she had been invited with her stepmother; but to which Mrs. Rowland had gone alone—with diamonds round her neck and in her hair.
“She would not have had any diamonds but for papa,” said Marion. “She was quite nobody when he married her.”
“Oh, now I don’t think that can be true,” said Eddy, “for my governor, you know—” an impulse of wisdom checked the young man—“couldn’t have known her, could he, if she had been nobody?”
“Well, at least she was nobody out in India,” said Marion, “and to see her now! And I had to stay at home—me, papa’s own daughter, and the only one, and a very good dancer! And it was her that went to the ball, an old lady, and me, I had to stay at home!”
“It is a sort of thing that would justify an appeal to parliament,” said Eddy, “but there must have been some sort of reason alleged. Perhaps you had not a frock?”
“I have dozens of frocks,” said Marion, turning upon him with a gleam in her eye.
“Or you did not know the people?”