"He what!" she gasped.... "But that's wilder than all the rest put together!"
"It's what he thinks. There's simply his word for it. He can't explain it. But he's staking everything on it."
"Everything? What?"
"His future course, I suppose, whatever that is. By the way, has Madge said anything to you about him?"
She stared harder than ever. "Madge! Does Madge know him?"
"She doesn't know Derry. But she knows Arnaud. He's been to the house."
"He's been ... Oh-h-h-h!"
You may call me if you will the most dunderheaded fellow who ever meddled in things he did not understand. I deserve it all and more. All the same I must ask you to believe me when I say that it was not until that "Oh-h-h-h!" broke in an interminable contralto whisper from her lips that I saw what I had done. I had resolved that not one word of Jennie Aird's affairs should she learn from me. As much for her own sake as for Jennie's I had determined to spare her that.
And now I had gone and told her that very thing!
For the knowledge of it leaped full-blown out of that long record of her own heart. Jennie was in love; Arnaud had been to Ker Annic; therefore—she knew it, she knew it—Jennie was in love with Derry. How should anybody, seeing him as Julia Oliphant had seen him at his former twenty, not fall in love with him? Young, sunbrowned, beautiful, grave—only to see him, only to have him at the house for tea, was to be in love with him during the whole of the remaining days. Who knew this if Julia Oliphant did not? Jennie thenceforward would love him as she herself had loved him through the unbroken past. And if he thought his turning-point had now come, forward into the future again he and Jennie would go together.