“Only for you,” she whispered. “Please don't tell anybody else.”
“You beat all,” he told her. “I suppose I'm making myself ridiculous dancing away here with—h'm!—auld lang syne, but faith I have the advantage now of the others, and you mustn't let on when the thing comes out that I did not know you from the outset. I have a crow to pick with Miss Ailie about this—the rogue! But, young woman, it's an actress you are!”
“Not yet, but it's an actress I mean to be,” she said, poussetting with him.
“H'm!” said he, “there seems the natural gift for it; but once on a time I made up my mind it was to be poetry.”
“I've got over poetry,” she said. “I found I was only one of that kind of poets who always cut it up in fourteen-line lengths and begin with 'As when.' No, it's to be the stage, Dr. Brash; I guess God's fixed it.” “Whiles He is—h'm—injudicious,” said the doctor. “But what about Aunt Bell?”
“There's no buts about it, though I admit I'm worried to think of Auntie Bell. She considers acting is almost as bad as lying, and talks about the theatre as Satan's abode. If it wasn't that she was from home to-night, I daren't have been here. I wish—I wish I didn't love her so—almost—for I feel I've got to vex her pretty bad.”
“Indeed you have,” said Dr. Brash. “And you've spoiled my dancing, for I've a great respect for that devoted little woman.”
Back in the alcove The Macintosh found more to surround her than ever, though it was the penalty of her apparent age that they were readier to joke than dance with her. Captain Consequence, wanting a wife with money, if and when his mother should be taken from him, never lost a chance to see how a pompous manner and his medals would affect strange ladies; he was so marked in his attention and created such amusement to the company that, pitying him, and fearful of her own deception, she proposed to tell fortunes. The ladies brought her their emptied teacups; the men solemnly laid their palms before her; she divined for all their past and future in a practised way that astonished her uncle and aunt, who, afraid of some awkward sally, had kept aloof at first from her levee, but now were the most interested of her audience.
Over the leaves in Miss Minto's cup she frowned through her clouded glasses. “There's lots o' money,” said she, “and a braw house, and a muckle garden wi' bees and trees in't, and a wheen boy's speilin' the wa's—you may be aye assured o' bien circumstances, Miss Minto.”
Miss Minto, warmly conscious of the lawyer at her back, could have wished for a fortune less prosaic.