And then, with perplexing speed, another vision rose. He saw the face of Cydonia, with her childish smile. That was the right setting for a young girl, he decided, that cultured, shrine-like home, locked from the world outside.
For man still clings fondly to feudal memories. His reason may force him to approve the great stride of woman to the foreground of intellectual power, but his instinct still whispers that the woman he loves should be guarded from evil and from too curious eyes.
Some day this may fade away, swept aside in the course of the growing cry for freedom, but with it will pass a hidden safeguard to the sex, a human note divine—that tenderness towards the weak, purifying passion.
Well—it was all a mystery! McTaggart yawned and stretched. Almost as bewildering as his own curious case. He fell to thinking again about his double heart, Cydonia and Fantine at the back of his mind.
"It might lead to bigamy." He recalled the doctor's words—not without a certain youthful complacency! He dallied with the notion of possible married life, attracted by the novelty but mistrustful of the tie.
And here Romance was rudely assailed by an interruption from the world without and he became conscious of a knocking, loud and long, on the further door of his sitting-room.
McTaggart cursed the invisible one. Struggling out of bed he threw on a dressing-gown and blinking at the light made his way through the folding-doors to where his breakfast lay and called an exasperated, husky "Come in."
"Hullo, Peter!" a cheery voice replied—"hope I didn't wake you from your beauty sleep?"
In the open doorway stood a thick-set man, rendered still more bulky by a tweed overcoat, with merry dark eyes under shaggy brows, gleaming out of his pale, square face.
"Just off shooting," he explained hurriedly—"and run out of whiskey"—he held up a flask—"no time to get it in, so I thought as I passed your door I'd try and cadge some from you, old man."