“But how do you mean that? Ye were best to explain clearly, ma’am.”
“You are animated—then you are thinking of getting on. You are sad the next moment—then you are thinking of Scotland and friends.”
“Yes. I think of home sometimes!” he said simply.
“So do I—as far as I can. But it was an old house where I was born, and they pulled it down for improvements, so I seem hardly to have any home to think of now.”
Lucetta did not add, as she might have done, that the house was in St. Helier, and not in Bath.
“But the mountains, and the mists and the rocks, they are there! And don’t they seem like home?”
She shook her head.
“They do to me—they do to me,” he murmured. And his mind could be seen flying away northwards. Whether its origin were national or personal, it was quite true what Lucetta had said, that the curious double strands in Farfrae’s thread of life—the commercial and the romantic—were very distinct at times. Like the colours in a variegated cord those contrasts could be seen intertwisted, yet not mingling.
“You are wishing you were back again,” she said.
“Ah, no, ma’am,” said Farfrae, suddenly recalling himself.