Miss Penny--Hennie Penny! What a delightfully ludicrous name! And what a delightful creature she was!--Miss Penny, unless he had been dreaming, had said they had come to get away from things--and people! Now what did she mean by that--if she really had said it and he had not been dreaming?
Was it possible Margaret had come to get away from Jeremiah Pixley and Charles Svendt? On the face of it, it seemed not impossible, for Graeme's only wonder was that she could ever have borne with them so long.
His brain was in a whirl. The eyes of his understanding were as the eyes of one immured for thirty days in a dark cell and then dragged suddenly into the full blaze of the sun. If he had just drunk a magnum of champagne he could not have felt more elevated, and he would certainly have felt very different. For his eye was clear as a jewel, and his hand was steady as a rock, though his heart had not yet settled to its beat and the red blood danced in his veins like fire.
"Jock, my lad," he said to himself, as he got the knot of his tie to his liking at last,--"keep a grip of yourself and go steady. Such a thing is enough to throw any man a bit off the rails. Ca' canny, my lad, ca' canny!"
"Meg, I rather like young men with rippled hair," said Miss Hennie Penny, as they passed the Carrefour and strolled between the dewy hedges towards La Tour, with larks by the dozen bursting their hearts in the freshness of the morning above them.
"Do you, dear? I thought you scorned young men?"
"As a class, yes!--Especially the Cambridge variety. But not in particular. I make an exception in this case."
"So good of you!" murmured Margaret in her best company manner.
"Why did you never tell me how nice he was?"
"Tell you how nice he was? I don't remember ever discussing him with you in any shape or form whatever."
"Not to say discussed exactly, but you can't deny that you've mentioned him occasionally."
"So I have William Shakespeare and Alfred Tennyson--"
"You're right, my dear. This is a horse of quite another colour. An awfully decent colour too. I'm glad you appreciate it. He's as brown as a gipsy and not an ounce of flab about him. Charles Pixley is mostly flab--"
"Don't be rude, Hen. You don't know Charles. And do drop your school slang--"