“Good-bye, Ursa Major with the sore head, and don’t ask questions.”
The girl curtseyed to him in the doorway as she left, and Nairn turned his face to the wall again with a groan.
A girl knows when a man’s eyes follow her about the room, and she knows why—long before the man does. But the man finds it out soon enough.
Nairn pushed away the books and papers. They had no charm for him, and, as he could not sleep, he fell presently to tracing the design of the wallpaper and counting how many varieties or bunches of flowers went to make up the general pattern. He detected small irregularities in the joinings, and they annoyed him. So he turned round and stared at the ceiling; but he had studied that before, and he knew which board contained the most knots, and how many boards had apparently been cut from the same log. There were two boards which were twins; so exactly did they match, they must have been parted by but one saw-cut; and he speculated if there could be any sort of intelligence in them that could be roused to wonder or gratitude that they, cut in Norway from one stately old pine, should pass through many hands and yet find a resting-place side by side ten thousand miles away in the gold-fields of the Transvaal.
Nairn’s eyelids drooped heavily. One sleepy chuckle escaped him at his own quaint conceit, as he wondered whether the ceiling boards considered the flooring boards beneath them, and if they ever put on side on that account; and the smile of lazy content remained long after he was fast asleep.
It was the scent of flowers that roused him. Violets! And he had not smelt them for twelve years!
Miss Kate was sitting there looking at him, and, but for the scent of the flowers and the slanting sunbeams, he might have thought she had never left.
“Does the big bear like flowers?”
He was too contented to do more than smile. “And he won’t eat me now?”
“When Beauty picked the flowers, what did the Beast do?”