To all of this the friend, also a Scot, hearkened without emitting a syllable.
When, however, his ear detected the accents of finality, he shook the ashes from his pipe and opened his lips: "I fell in with the rejected gentleman the other day".
"Foster? No? Did you? Did you really? How was that?" In an instant the doctor was on the alert.
"I was on my holiday, doing a bit of fishing in an out-of-the-way part of Sutherland, and there were only two or three of us in the hotel. Foster was one."
"A tall, thin man, with a lantern-jawed face?"
"That's him. One of the others had got wind of this tale, and told me. We were talking of you, I fancy; and he had been down here a whiley ago, when the affair was fresh."
"Fishing like the rest of us--but always by himself. He wasn't uncivil, only unsociable. I had a walk with him one day, and he talked about India. A good part of his life had been spent in India, and he could tell a lot about it, but when the talk came round home, he shut up like a knife, and I kind of jaloused there was something wrong. That was before I knew what it was."
"How? I can't tell you how. He just _looked_. That was enough for me."
"Well, you saw the sort of chap he was, just the one to take a woman's fancy,--and to think that Maud Boldero could be so blind daft as to throw him over for that poor Val, whom she could have picked up at any time!"
"What has become of the others? Do you ever hear anything of them?"
"Sybil has married. She married pretty quickly after they left. A London man; a barrister, I think. Sybil is good-looking enough, they are all good-looking; though Maud's the pick of the bunch. Stop a bit, I'm not sure that the little rascal Leonore--but no, no; she hadn't the air, the style; it was just a way she had,--eh, she was a bit beguiling thing. There's that new boy of mine, he has twice the go that poor Tommy had, though nothing like the brains--but he's all over the place among the lasses, and when I hear him whistling here and whistling there, with his nose in at every open door, thinks I to myself, 'Thank the Lord, Leonore Stubbs is out of Jock's way'."
Leonore was out of everybody's way, it seemed,--or it might have been that she had ceased to be beguiling. People who met her during the next year of her life, found a quiet young girl--she still looked very young--with rather an interesting countenance; but if drawn thereby to prosecute her acquaintance, they tried to engage her in their pursuits and pleasures, they were disappointed. She did not respond to buoyant propositions; games and pastimes did not attract her; they thought she did not know how to flirt.