That last evening was very odd and constrained. We could not help
looking on the lovers as new specimens over which some strange
transformation had passed, though for the present it had stiffened
them in public into the strictest good behaviour. They would have
been awkward if it had been possible to either of them, and, save
for a certain look in their eyes, comported themselves as perfect
strangers.
The three elder gentlemen held discussions in the dining-room, but
we were not trusted in our playground adjoining. Mrs. Fordyce
nailed Griff down to an interminable game at chess, and my mother
kept the two girls playing duets, while Clarence turned over the
leaves; and I read over The Lady of the Lake, a study which I always
felt, and still feel, as an act of homage to Ellen Fordyce, though
there was not much in common between her and the maid of Douglas.
Indeed, it was a joke of her father's to tease her by criticising
the famous passage about the tears that old Douglas shed over his
duteous daughter's head--'What in the world should the man go
whining and crying for? He had much better have laughed with her.'
Little did the elders know what was going on in the next room, where
there was a grand courtship among the dolls; the hero being a small
jointed Dutch one in Swiss costume, about an eighth part of the size
of the resuscitated Celestina Mary, but the only available male
character in doll-land! Anne was supposed to be completely ignorant
of what passed above her head; and her mother would have been aghast
had she heard the remarkable discoveries and speculations that she
and Martyn communicated to one another.
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