“Oh no,” he replied, “I like chemistry better, and those things. Science.... If I hadn’t to earn my living I shouldn’t be working on scents in this factory. No! I’d be in a country cottage with a laboratory.”
“You do your best as it is,” she said, touching his stack of scientific books.
“I had a bit of training at Edinburgh University,” he said, in wistful reminiscence, “but one ought to dedicate years....”
“Who was your father?” she asked after much deliberation whether she might venture the question. She knew Morgan only as an isolated person, who had arrived one day into the world of the factory, and had never mentioned home or relations. She knew only that he was Scotch; he had a very slight Scotch accent.
“He was an Inverness crofter,” he replied vaguely, “I used to keep the sheep on the hills in mists and snows, and properly I hated it. The days were short, and I thought it was always winter. I used to sit shivering on the brae-side, huddled in a plaid for shelter under a boulder, trying to read while I kept one eye on the sheep. The pages of my book used to get damp and limp, and the print got blurred when I tried to dry the page with the corner of my jacket. Then somebody found out that I wasn’t getting any education, and reported it, so I was sent back to school, and was happy again. And you—you haven’t lived here always, have you?”
“Since I was ten,” she replied, sighing, “we used to live in the south before that ... I liked that,” she said, “it was a pretty place, Midhurst, near Arundel—perhaps you know it?” She thought innocently, and rather in the fashion of a child, that every one must know what she knew.
“I wish I did, but I don’t.”
“Oh, it’s under the Downs. Do you remember the day we walked with Silas to Thorpe’s Howland? that put me in mind of Midhurst; there were woods round about Midhurst.”
“You enjoyed yourself that day, didn’t you?”
He expected a little burst of rhapsody from her, but she only said quietly, “Yes, I did,” and he was aware of disappointment, and at the same time of the little stinging charm of her occasional unexpectedness.