"Why, what do you suppose he came back here for?" she says, warmly. "To go sailing in the White Dove? No; not if twenty White Doves were waiting for him! He knows too well the value of his time to stay away so long from London if it were merely to take the tiller of a yacht. He came back here, at great personal sacrifice, because Mary was on board."
"Has he told you so?"
"He has not; but one has eyes."
"Then suppose she has changed her mind: how can you help it?"
She says nothing for a second. She is preparing the table for Master Fred: perhaps she tosses the novels on to the couch with an impatience they do not at all deserve. But at length she says—
"Well; I never thought Mary would have been so fickle as to go chopping and changing about within the course of a few weeks. However, I won't accuse her of being mercenary; I will not believe that. Howard Smith is a most gentlemanly young man—good-looking, too, and pleasant tempered. I can imagine any girl liking him."
Here a volume of poems is pitched on to the top of the draught-board, as if it had done her some personal injury.
"And in any case she might be more civil to one who is a very old friend of ours," she adds.
Further discourse on this matter is impossible; for our Freidrich d'or comes in to prepare for luncheon. But why the charge of incivility? When we are once more assembled together, the girl is quite the reverse of uncivil towards him. She shows him—when she is forced to speak to him—an almost painful courtesy; and she turns her eyes down, as if she were afraid to speak to him. This is no flaunting coquette, proud of her wilful caprice.
And as for poor Angus, he does his best to propitiate her. They begin talking about the picturesqueness of various cities. Knowing that Miss Avon has lived the most of her life, if she was not actually born, in London, he strikes boldly for London. What is there in Venice, what is there in the world, like London in moonlight—with the splendid sweep of her river—and the long lines of gas-lamps—and the noble bridges? But she is all for Edinburgh if Edinburgh had but the Moldau running through that valley, and the bridges of Prague to span it, what city in Europe could compare with it? And the Laird is so delighted with her approval of the Scotch capital, that he forgets for the moment his Glaswegian antipathy to the rival city, and enlarges no less on the picturesqueness of it than on its wealth of historical traditions. There is not a stain of blood on any floor that he does not believe in. Then the Sanctuary of Holyrood: what stories has he not to tell about that famous refuse?