"Weel, it looked real like it. I wouldna gang to your dinner, Tinto, if you asked me like that."
"Perhaps you wouldn't take a shilling if I tossed it to you like that."
"It's a'thegither different," said Sandy, catching the coin adroitly enough. "I see nae analogy atween the twa. But jist take you my advice and quarrel nane, sir, especially with that young lad: thae Erskines are a dour race."
"You idiot! I was asking him to dinner," Torrance said. He was on friendly terms with all the common people, with a certain jocular roughness which did not displease them. Sandy stood imperturbable, with all the calm of a man accustomed to stand most of his time looking on at the vague and quiet doings of the world about him. Very little ever happened about the station. To have had a crack with Tinto was a great entertainment after the morning excitement, enough to maintain life upon for a long time, of having helped the luggage into the van, and assisted my lord and my lady to get away.
"I wish," cried Nora, as they rolled along the quiet road, "that you would not drag me in wherever John Erskine is going, Car!"
They all called him John Erskine. It was the habit of the neighbourhood, from which even strangers could scarcely get free.
"I drag you in! Ah, see how selfish we are without knowing!" said Carry. "I thought only that between Mr Torrance and myself--there would be little amusement."
"Amusement!" cried Nora--"always amusement! Is that all that is ever to be thought of even at a dinner-party?"
Carry was too serious to take up this challenge. "Dear Nora," she said, "I am afraid of John Erskine, though I cannot tell you why. I think Mr Torrance tries to irritate him: he does not mean it,--but they are so different. I know by my own experience that sometimes a tone, a look--which is nothing, which means nothing--will drive one beside one's self. That is why I would rather he did not come; and when he comes, I want some one--some one indifferent--to help me to make it seem like a common little dinner--like every day."
"Is it not like every day? Is there--anything? If you want me, Carry, of course there is not a word to be said." Nora looked at her with anxious, somewhat astonished eyes. She, too, was aware that before Carry's marriage--before the family came to Lindores--there had been _some one else_. But if that had been John, how then did it happen that Edith----Nora stopped short, confounded. To her young imagination the idea, not so very dreadful a one, that a man who had loved one sister might afterwards console himself with another, was a sort of sacrilege. But friendship went above all.