“What put that in your head? Did she suggest it herself?” asked Mr. Dyce, quickly, with his head to one side in his cross-examination manner.
“Well she did—but she didn't know it,” said Mr. Molyneux. “I guess about the very last thing that child'd suggest to anybody would be that she wanted to separate herself from folk she loves so much as you; but if there's one weakness about her it is that she can't conceal what she thinks, and I'd not been twenty minutes in her society before I found out she had the go-fever pretty bad. I suspect a predisposition to that complaint, and a good heart was all her father and mother left her, and lolling around and dwelling on the past isn't apt to be her foible. Two or three years in the boarding-school arena would put the cap-sheaf on the making of that girl's character, and I know, for there's my wife, and she had only a year and a half. If she'd had longer I guess she'd have had more sense than marry me. Bud's got almost every mortal thing a body wants here, I suppose—love in lumps, a warm, moist soil, and all the rest of it, but she wants to be hardened off, and for hardening off a human flower there's nothing better than a three-course college, where the social breeze is cooler than it is at home.”
Miss Bell turned pale—the blow had come! Dan looked at her with a little pity, for he knew she had long been fearfully expecting it.
“Indeed!” said she; “and I do not see the need for any such thing for a long while yet. Do you, Ailie?” But Ailie had no answer, and that was enough to show what she thought.
“I know how it feels at first to think of her going away from home,” continued Mr. Molyneux, eager to be on with a business he had no great heart for. “Bless you, I know how my wife felt about it: she cried like the cherubim and seraphim; said it was snatching all the sunshine out of her life; and when I said, 'Millicent Molyneux, what about hubby?' she just said 'Scat! and threw a couple of agonized throes. Now Edinburgh's not so very far away that you'd feel desolated if Bud went to a school there.”
“An unhealthy hole, with haars and horrible east wind,” said Miss Bell.
“Well, it isn't the Pacific slope if it comes to climate,” admitted Mr. Molyneux.
“No, but it's the most beautiful city in the wide world for all that,” cried Miss Bell, with such spirit that it cleared the air and made her sister and her brother smile, for Molyneux, without his knowing it, had touched her in the very heart's core of her national pride.
“You're sure you are not mistaken, and that she would wish to go to school?” asked Mr. Dyce.
“Do you doubt it yourself?” asked Molyneux, slyly.