"We 're not within a mile of the village; take your fingers out of your ears if you don't want me to shout."
"Not till you stop shouting." He lowered his voice then, and I unstopped my ears.
"I say, Marcia, I believe it's all a rotten lot of damned gossip--"
"Why, Jamie Macleod! I never heard you use so strong an expression."
"I don't care; it's my way of letting off steam. Mother is n't round."
We both laughed and grew good-humored again.
"I never thought a Scotsman, who takes porridge regularly at nine o'clock every evening, could swear--"
"Oh, did n't you! Where are _your_ wisdom teeth? Live and learn, Marcia."
"Honestly, Marcia, I could n't answer you in any other way. Ewart has never opened his lips to me about his intimate personal life; he has no need to--for, of course, there is a great difference in our ages even if he is such a companion. And then, you know, I only saw him that one week in Crieff when he was with us, and I was a little chap--it was just after father left us--and he was no end good to me. And the second time was this year in June when he stayed a week here and then took me up to André. He was with us a month in camp; that is where I came to know him so well. He 's an Oxford man, and that's what I was aiming at when--when my health funked. He seems to understand how hard it is to me to give it all up. I don't object to telling you it was Doctor Rugvie who was going to put me through."
"Oh, Jamie!" It was all I could say, for I had known during our few weeks of an intimacy, which circumstances warranted, that some great disappointment had been his--wholly apart from his being handicapped by his inheritance.
"About Ewart," he went on; "you know a village is a village, and a dish of gossip is meat and drink for all alike. It's only a rumor anyway, but it crops out at odd times and in the queerest places that he was married and divorced, and that he has a son living whom he is educating in Europe. I don't believe one bally word of it, and I don't want you to."
"Now, if you want to know about Doctor Rugvie, I can tell you. He lives, you might say, in the open. Ewart strikes me as the kind that takes to covert more. Doctor Rugvie is older too."
"He 's fifty-four--and he is a widower, a straight out and out one."