“It looked to me uncommonly like it at any rate,” said Mandy. “You surely don't deny that you were kissing him?”
“I was not. I mean, it was Smith—perhaps—yes, I think Smith did—”
“Well, it was a silly thing to do.”
“Silly! If I want to kiss Mr. Smith, why is it anybody's business?”
“That's just it,” said Mandy indignantly. “Why should you want to?”
“Well, that is my affair,” said Moira in an angry tone, and with a high head and lofty air she appeared in the doctor's presence.
But Dr. Martin was apparently oblivious of both her lofty air and the angle of her chin. He was struggling to suppress from observation a tumult of mingled passions of jealousy, rage and humiliation. That this girl whom for four years he had loved with the full strength of his intense nature should have given herself to another was grief enough; but the fact that this other should have been a man of Smith's caliber seemed to add insult to his grief. He felt that not only had she humiliated him but herself as well.
“If she is the kind of girl that enjoys kissing Smith I don't want her,” he said to himself savagely, and then cursed himself that he knew it was a lie. For no matter how she should affront him or humiliate herself he well knew he should take her gladly on his bended knees from Smith's hands. The cure somehow was not working, but he would allow no one to suspect it. His voice was even and his manner cheerful as ever. Only Mrs. Cameron, who held the key to his heart, suspected the agony through which he was passing during the tea-hour. And it was to secure respite for him that the tea was hurried and the doctor packed off to saddle Pepper and round up the cows for the milking.
Pepper was by birth and breeding a cow-horse, and once set upon a trail after a bunch of cows he could be trusted to round them up with little or no aid from his rider. Hence once astride Pepper and Pepper with his nose pointed toward the ranging cows, the doctor could allow his heart to roam at will. And like a homing pigeon, his heart, after some faint struggles in the grip of its owner's will, made swift flight toward the far-away Highland glen across the sea, the Cuagh Oir.
With deliberate purpose he set himself to live again the tender and ineffaceable memories of that eventful visit to the glen when first his eyes were filled with the vision of the girl with the sunny hair and the sunny eyes who that day seemed to fill the very glen and ever since that day his heart with glory.