‘A nymph! Hum,’ remarked the vicar softly to himself.
‘But I have never yet ventured to—to’——
‘Gush into song,’ suggested Miss Pen.
‘To attempt to clothe my thoughts in rhythmic measures,’ went on her ladyship with a little wave of the hand, as though deprecating interruption, ‘although I have often felt an inward voice which impelled me to do so.’
‘Let me advise you to try, my dear madam,’ resumed the doctor with his gravest professional air. ‘If I may be allowed to say so, you have the eye of a poet—dreamy, imaginative, with a sort of far-away gaze in it, as though you were looking at something a long way off which nobody but yourself could see.’
‘Ought I to listen to these things in silence?’ asked the vicar of himself with a sudden qualm of conscience.
‘You are a great, naughty flatterer, Dr M‘Murdo,’ said the widow, shaking a podgy finger archly at him.
‘Madam, that is one of the points on which my education has been shamefully neglected.’
She turned with a smile. ‘I trust that our dear vicar is also a worshipper of the beautiful?’
‘With Lady Renshaw before my eyes, it would be rank heresy to doubt it,’ stammered the dear old boy with a blush that would have become a lad of eighteen.