“I thought myself young enough to venture it; but, of course, if you object——”
He looked at her helplessly, realising that she was making fun of him, and she laughed. All her assurance was back to her, she knew the young gentleman was one she could twist round her little finger.
“Well, well,” she went on after a silence, “you seem poorly provided with small talk. In Edinburgh, now, a young man with your chances would be making love to me by this time.”
He stared at her aghast. “But, but——”
“But I would not permit it, of course not! We were brought up very particularly in Miss Simpson’s, I can assure you.” This with a prim tightening of her lips and a severity that any other than our dreamer would have understood. To Nan there came a delight in this play with an intelligence she knew so keen, though different from her own. It was with a holiday feeling she laughed and shone, mischievously eyeing him and trying him with badinage as they penetrated deeper into the policies.
They reached the Lady’s Linn, but did not repeat old history to the extent of seating themselves on the banks, though Gilian half suggested it in a momentary boldness.
“No, no,” said she. “We were taught better than that in Miss Simpson’s. And fancy the risks of rheumatism! You told me one of Gillesbeg Aotram’s stories here; what was it again?”
He repeated the tale of the King of Knapdale’s Daughter. She listened attentively, sometimes amused at his earnestness, that sat on him gaukily, sometimes serious enough, touched with the poetry he could put into the narrative.
“It is a kind of gruesome fable,” she said when he was done, and she shuddered slightly. “The other brother was Death, wasn’t he? When you told it to me last I did not understand.”
They walked on through the intersecting paths whose maze had so bewildered them before: “After all, it is not a bit like what it was,” said she. “I thought it would take a wizard to get out of here, and now I can see over the bushes and the sea is in sight all the time.”