Stewart Stevenson, walking home alone, admitted to himself the aptness of the quotation, and wondered what his mother would make of such a character. She would hardly value such traits in a daughter-in-law. Not, of course, that there was any question of such a thing. He knew he had not the remotest chance, and that certainty sent him in to the solid comfort of the Lochnagar dining-room feeling that the world was a singularly dull place, and nothing was left remarkable beneath the visiting moon.
*****
"Are ye going out to-night, Stewart?" his mother asked him, as they were rising from the dinner-table. There was just a note of anxiety in her voice: the Heart's Ease Library and the capering ladies were always at the back of her mind.
"It's the Shakespeare Reading to-night, and I wasn't at the last. I think I'll look in for an hour. I see that it's at Mrs. Forsyth's to-night."
Mrs. Stevenson nodded, well satisfied. No harm could come to a young man who went to Shakespeare Readings. She had never been at one herself, and rather confused them in her mind with Freemasons, but she knew they were Respectable. She had met Mrs. Forsyth that very day, calling at another villa, and she had mentioned that it was her evening for Shakespeare.
Mrs. Forsyth was inclined to laugh about it.
"I don't go in all the evening," she told Mrs. Stevenson, "because you have to sit quiet and listen; but I whiles take my knitting and go in to see how they're getting on. There they all are, as solemn as ye like, with Romeo, Romeo here and somebody else there—folk that have been dead very near from the beginning of the world. I take a good laugh to myself when I come out. And it's hungry work too, mind you. They do justice to my sangwiches, I can tell you."
But though she laughed, Mrs. Forsyth had a great respect for Shakespeare. Her son Hugh thought well of him and that was enough for her.
Stewart Stevenson was a little late, and the parts had been given out and the Reading begun.
He stood at the door for a moment looking round the room. Miss Gertrude Simpson gave him a glance of recognition and moved ever so slightly, as if to show that there was room beside her on the sofa, but he saw Jessie Thomson over on the window-seat—it was at the Thomson's that he had met Elizabeth Seton; the Thomsons went to Mr. Seton's church; it was not the rose but it was someone who at times was near the rose—and he went and sat down beside Jessie.