“Not at all, General,” laughed the visitor. “If you spent your life trying to cure fussy ladies of imaginary eye trouble, without putting it to them that their livers are out of order, you’d welcome this as a very appetising antidote.”
“Talking about appetites,” his host suggested, “who says breakfast?”
“I fancy we both do,” I answered, and we turned indoors.
During breakfast Garnesk announced his determination to devote as much of the day as necessary to an examination of Myra, and then catch the evening train from Mallaig, but the girl herself rose in rebellion at this immediately.
“You mustn’t do anything of the sort,” she declared emphatically. “Daddy, tell him he’s not to. The idea of coming up here, and looking at me, and then going away again! It’s ridiculous!”
“I assure you, it is ample reward,” declared the oculist gallantly, and everybody laughed at the frank compliment.
“But you must fish the river, have a day on the loch. Ron must take you in the motor-boat up to Kinlochbourn. Then you’ve simply got to see Scavaig and Coruisk—oh! and a hundred other things besides.”
Garnesk insisted that, much as he would like to stay, he felt bound to leave at once, but Myra was equally obstinate; and, as was natural, being a woman, she won on a compromise. Garnesk agreed to stay over the week-end. I was very glad that Myra liked my new friend. She had been very shy of Olvery, but she took an immediate fancy to the Glasgow specialist. She liked his voice, she told me afterwards, and on the second day of his visit she asked him if his sister was very much younger than he. Garnesk looked up in surprise.
“One of them is,” he replied, “nearly twenty years. What made you ask?”
“I guessed it by the way you talk to me,” Myra declared confidently.