"You really want to know--then here goes. She told me you were tall--like a king's own daughter; that your hair was as golden as a fairy tale, and your eyes as grey as glass. She told me of suitors waiting on your favours----" Elizabeth dropped her knitting with a gasp. "If Aunt Alice told you all that--well, I've no right to say a word, for she did it to glorify me, and perhaps her kind eyes and heart made her think it true; but surely you don't think I am such a conceited donkey as to believe it." "But isn't it true?--about the suitors, I mean?" "Suitors! How very plural you are!" "But I would rather keep them in the plural," he pleaded; "they are more harmless that way. But Aunt Alice did talk about some particular fellow--I think Gordon was his wretched name." "Bother!" said Elizabeth. "I've dropped a stitch." She bent industriously over her knitting. "I'm waiting, Elizabeth." "What for?" "To hear about Mr. Gordon." "Oh! you must ask Aunt Alice," Elizabeth said demurely. "She is your fount of information." Then she threw down her knitting. "Arthur, don't let's talk any more about such silly subjects. They don't interest me in the least." "Is Mr. Gordon a silly subject?" "The silliest ever. No--of course he isn't. Why do you make me say nasty things? He is only silly to me because I am an ungrateful creature. I don't expect I shall ever marry. You see, I would never be a grateful wife, and it seems a pity to use up a man, so to speak, when there are so few men and so many women who would be grateful wives and may have to go without. I think I am a born spinster, and as long as I have got Father and Buff and the boys in India I shall be more than content." "Buff must go to school soon," he warned her. "Your brothers may marry; your father can't be with you always." "Oh, don't try to discourage me in my spinster path. You are as bad as Aunt Alice. She thinks of me as living a sort of submerged existence here in Glasgow, and only coming to the surface to breathe when I go to London or travel with her. But I'm not in the least stifled with my life. I wouldn't change with anybody; and as for getting married and going off with trunks of horrid new unfamiliar clothes, and a horrid new unfamiliar husband, I wouldn't do it. I haven't much ambition; I don't ask for adventures; though I look so large and bold, I have but a peeping and a timorous soul." She smiled across at Arthur, as if inviting him to share her point of view; but he looked into the fire and did not meet her glance. "Then you think," he said, "that you will be happy all your life--alone?"