Thurso recollected his own meeting with Cochrane.
"No, I don't think he would," he said. "Because I met him in the village yesterday evening, and I agree he doesn't look like that. Go on."
"Isn't that enough?" she asked. "Afterwards we sat and talked as if I hadn't been caught poaching at all. He begged me to go on fishing, too, and he did it, somehow, so simply and naturally that I thanked him and did go on. I caught six sea-trout, too, and we're just going to have some of them. He really made it easy for me to say 'Yes.' In fact, it would have been absurd to say 'No.'"
"That almost beats everything," he said. "You are absolutely brazen."
"Not in the least. When you see Mr. Cochrane you will understand how simple it was."
"I have seen him, as I told you. It occurred to me then that we might ask him to dinner. It was that I began to suggest last night, but you were so curious to know what I was going to say that I stopped."
"Oh, Thurso, if you had gone on you would have saved me from all this!" she said. "But don't you understand how it was possible for me to accept?"
"Yes, even though I did not speak to him, I think perhaps I do. He did look to be the sort of man whose sea-trout you might catch after he had caught you poaching his salmon. That is rather a high compliment. It is a great gift to be able to make people not ashamed of themselves. I should have absolutely sunk into the earth."
"And Mr. Cochrane would very kindly have pulled you out," said Maud. "At least, he pulled me out."
There was a short pause, during which Maud occupied her mouth with sea-trout and her mind with the question as to whether she should tell Thurso that Mr. Cochrane was a Christian Scientist. But his remark that it was not his plan to proselytise decided her against doing so. Then Thurso spoke again.
"Do you know, to-day is the first on which I haven't felt absolutely swamped and water-logged with depression and anxiety?" he said. "There has been no fresh case since morning, and Duncan's wife, who, like Sandie, was almost despaired of, has taken a sudden inexplicable turn for the better. She was dying of sheer exhaustion from fever, and now all day she has been gaining strength--gaining it quickly, too, though you would have said there was no strength left. I saw Duncan this evening. He--really, I wondered whether he had been drinking."