“There was occasion,” said Johnny, relapsing a little into the clouds. “Why were you such friends with that empty-headed ass? And coming along the sands smiling at him as if--as if----”
“As if what?” said Elsie. She laughed again, the laugh of conscious power. She was not perhaps so fine a character as, considering all things, she might have been expected to be.
“Elsie,” said the young man, “it’s not me that shall name it. If it really turns out to be something, as I think it will, I am going to call it after you.”
“A grand compliment,” cried the girl, with another peel of laughter. “A jeely fish! But,” she added, quickly, “I think it is awfully nice of you, Johnny; for those are the sort of things, I know, that you like best in the world.”
“Not quite,” said the naturalist. “There are things I care for far more than beasts, and if you don’t know that, you are not so quick at the uptake as I have always thought you; but what is the good when I am nobody, and never will be anybody, if I were to howk and ferret for new beasts till I die!”
“Bide a wee, bide a wee,” said Elsie, laughing, but confused; “you will be a placed minister, and as good as any of them; and what could ye have better than that?”
“I am the most unfortunate man in the world,” said Johnny, “for you know that, which is the only way for a poor lad like me, it is not what I want.”
“And you are not blate to say so to me that am a minister’s daughter, and very proud of it,” cried Elsie, with a flush of offence.
“That’s just the worst of it,” said Johnny, sadly, shaking his head, “for maybe you, and certainly other folk, will believe indeed I am not blate, thinking too much of myself, not to be content with a kirk if I could get one. But you should know it isn’t that. I think too little of myself. Never could I be a man like your father, that is one of the excellent of the earth. It is the like of him, and not the like of me, that should be a minister. And then whatever I was, and wherever I was,” he added, with a humility that was almost comic, “I would always have something inside teasing me to be after the beasts all the same.”
“What are you going to do with it now?” said Elsie, looking down at the unconscious object of all this discussion, which lay semi-transparent, and a little dulled in the delicate mauve colour of its interesting markings, on the bed she had made of the tangles of the dulse at her feet.