As they talked commonplaces during the remainder of the walk, Paul felt more contented than he had done for a week, even while he was asking himself captiously why this should be so. To see the girl you like, and say not a single word to her ear alone, to shake hands with her and feel no desire to prolong the touch, to look in her face and see nothing that was not clear and cold in her eyes, was not, could not, be comforting. Clearly his feeling for her was not to be classed as a passion. And yet how glad he had been to see her. How contented he had been to walk beside her, and what a sense of _bien-être_ her presence gave him. And it was distinctly satisfactory to find it so little disturbing. Then, recognising the fact that he was becoming absent in the effort to remember the exact look on her face as she shook hands with him, he set the thought of her from him angrily. He would not be the sport of a mere sentimental fancy, unworthy of a man who had the courage to face his own manhood. CHAPTER XIII. The next morning Paul, smoking his usual cigar of proprietorship about the stables and dog kennels, saw Mrs. Vane coming with a pretty little air of hesitation along one of the shrubbery paths. "_Ben trovato!_ Who would have thought of finding you here?" she cried gaily, just as if she had not been watching to catch him from her window for the last ten minutes. "I have missed my way to the Lodge; show it to me, please." He looked into her clever, charming face, understanding perfectly what she was at, and yet the _finesse_ did not irritate him as it would have done in another woman. Besides, in this instance, she was just a little too clever, as he meant to prove to her. "By all means," he replied coolly; "I was just going there myself to apologise to Mrs. Cameron for my sister's negligence, but really the weather has been so bad." Mrs. Vane shot an amused glance at her tall companion. So Paul meant to ride the high horse, that poorest of all defences against a quick wit; like that of lance against bayonet, dignified and circumambient, but quite ineffectual. "But I am not going to see Mrs. Cameron," she retorted frankly; "I am going to see if Miss Carmichael will be kind and play Bach to me; it is a long time since I heard him played so well. You used to be fond of him, too, in the old days, Paul. Don't you remember how you used to lie on the sofa after that fever and declare that a wife's first duty was to be able to play to her husband? But girls--at least, most girls--don't care to play nowadays unless they are professionals. And if they are professionals they don't care to be wives--not even to a Highland laird."