'Ronald.'
'Nonsense. He is hard as nails. He don't know what nerves mean.'
'He is a very nervous man,' she insisted (and had she not been studying him for a whole day?). 'His eyes throb when you meet them suddenly. Or rather he seems to know they are very powerful and penetrating—and he does not like to stare at you—so you can see there is a tremor of the lid sometimes as he looks up—as if he would partly veil his eyes. It's very curious. He's shy—like a wild animal almost. And that pretty girl I met this morning has something of that look too.'
'Perhaps they're not used to having the cold gaze of science turned on them,' her father remarked drily.
'Is that me?'
'You may take it that way.'
'Then you're quite wrong. It isn't science at all. It is an active and benevolent sympathy; I am going to make friends with every one of them. Ronald says her name is Miss Douglas—and I mean to call.'
'Very well, then,' said her father, who left this young lady pretty much the mistress of her own actions.
However, to return to the fishing: the morning did not promise well, the weather being too bright and clear, though there was a very fair breeze—of a curious sultry character for the middle of March—blowing up from the south and making a good ripple on the loch. Again and again the two boats crossed each other; and the invariable cry was—
'Nothing yet?'