“Strange girl!” muttered Mrs Moss as she turned, and occupied herself with some mysterious—we might almost say captious—operations before the looking-glass. “The mountain air seems to have increased her spirits wonderfully. Perhaps love has something to do with it! It may be both!”
She was still engaged with a subtle analysis of this question—in front of the glass, which gave her the advantage of supposing that she talked with an opponent—when sudden and uproarious laughter was heard in the adjoining room. It was Barret’s sitting-room, in which his friends were wont to visit him. She could distinguish that the laughter proceeded from himself, Milly, and Giles Jackman, though the walls were too thick to permit of either words or ordinary tones being heard.
“Milly,” said Mrs Moss, severely, when they met a few minutes later in the drawing-room, “what were you two and Mr Jackman laughing at so loudly? Surely you did not tell them what we had been speaking about?”
“Of course I did, mother. I did not know you intended to keep the matter secret. And it did so tickle them! But no one else knows it, so I will run back to John and pledge him to secrecy. You can caution Mr Jackman, who will be down directly, no doubt.”
As Barret had not at that time recovered sufficiently to admit of his going downstairs, his friends were wont to spend much of their time in the snug sitting-room which had been apportioned to him. He usually held his levées costumed in a huge flowered dressing-gown, belonging to the laird, so that, although he began to look more like his former self, as he recovered from his injuries, he was still sufficiently disguised to prevent recognition on the part of Mrs Moss.
Nevertheless, the old lady felt strangely perplexed about him.
One day the greater part of the household was assembled in his room when Mrs Moss remarked on this curious feeling.
“I cannot tell what it is, Mr Barret, that makes the sound of your voice seem familiar to me,” she said; “yet not exactly familiar, but a sort of far-away echo, you know, such as one might have heard in a dream; though, after all, I don’t think I ever did hear a voice in a dream.”
Jackman and Milly glanced at each other, and the latter put the safety-valve to her mouth while Barret replied—
“I don’t know,” he said, with a very grave appearance of profound thought, “that I ever myself dreamt a voice, or, indeed, a sound of any kind. As to what you say about some voices appearing to be familiar, don’t you think that has something to do with classes of men? No man, I think, is a solitary unit in creation. Every man is, as it were, the type of a class to which he belongs—each member possessing more or less the complexion, tendencies, characteristics, tones, etcetera, of his particular class. You are familiar, it may be, with the tones of the class to which I belong, and hence the idea that you have heard my voice before.”