Her father laughed.
“Pooh!” he exclaimed. “Is that all you have of our news here that you don’t know Gilian’s farming, or making a show of farming, in Ladyfield? He never took to the Army after all, and an old brag of Mars is very humorous now when I think of it.”
“I told him he never would,” said Nan, with no note of triumph in the accuracy of her prediction. “I thought he could play-act the thing in his mind too well ever to be the thing itself.”
“It was Young Islay I meant,” said her father. “A smart fellow; he’s home on leave from his corps, and he promises to come some day this week to see the girl whose father has some reason to be grateful to him.”
She flushed all at once, overtaken by feelings she could not have described—feelings of gratitude for the old rescue, of curiosity, pleasure, and a sudden shyness. Following it came a sudden recollection of the old glamour that was about the ensign—such another, no doubt, as Young Islay—who had given her the first taste of gallantry as he passed with the troops in a day of sunshine. She looked out at the window to conceal her eyes, and behold! the glen was not so melancholy as it was a little ago. She wished she had put on another gown that afternoon, the rustling one of double tabinet that her Edinburgh friends considered too imposing for her years, but that she herself felt a singular complacence in no matter what her company might be.
“A smart fellow,” repeated her father musingly, flicking some dust from his shoes, unobserving of her abstraction. “I wish Sandy took a lesson or two from him in application.”
“Ah!” she cried, “you’re partial just because——”
And she hesitated.
—“Just because he saved my lassie’s life,” continued Turner, and seized by an uncommon impulse he put an arm round her and bent to kiss her not unwilling lips. He paused at the threshold, and drew back with a half-shamed laugh.
“Tuts!” said he. “You smit me with silly lowland customs. Fancy your old Highland daddie kissing you! If it had been the young gentleman we speak of——”