Friends and Lovers Read Free

of her eyes.
    He looked sharply at George, but Fenton-Stevens was helping Mrs. McDonald to clear a chair of magazines, and Mrs. McDonald was saying that Miss. Penny was always so thoughtful about bringing her something to read, which was a nice change from the knitting. It was clear from her matter-of-fact words, and George’s equally sensible reply, and Captain Ma clean practical absorption in the excellent soda scones and fresh butter, that none of them realized they had just seen a miracle of a girl.
    David concentrated on the difficult problem of eating a newly baked oatcake.
    He was thankful that George had noticed so little, or else there would have been much leg-pulling for days—perhaps even weeks—about his sudden aberration. He could hear George saying to a group of Oxford friends, when the subject of women came up,
    “Remember David and his neat speeches on women being a snare and delusion?
    If they are pretty they have no heart, no brain. A pretty girl doesn’t need them: she doesn’t need anything except her face-value, which she has calculated to the last shilling. Well, don’t listen to him … You should have seen him, holding on to her hand, no doubt supporting himself, for he would have fallen flat on his back if he had let go.” At least, David now reflected, he had been spared that.
    “You are very quiet, David,” George remarked, with a slight touch of prodding. Sometimes David was really too difficult socially. He had entered this cottage with good enough grace, but here he was in one of those preoccupied moods of his.
    “I am wrestling with this,” David said, and indicated the mess of golden crumbs which covered his plate.
    “It looks as if I needed a spoon, doesn’t it?”
    That amused his hostess; and her brother remarked, as he tactfully demonstrated how to spread butter on oatcake by putting the cake on the flat tablecloth rather than on the curved surface of the plate, that Mr. Bosworth was a great one for the joking. David saw a gleam in George’s eye, and knew that if any reminiscences about this visit were to be created in Oxford—for George rather fancied himself as a storyteller—then Ma clean summing up would be the chief reason for mirth. George would develop a masterly rendering of the Highlander’s pronunciation of the initial consonant. “He’s a crate one for the choking,” George would say at the right moment after David had produced an attempt at wit. But that was the kind of leg-pulling that David could take.
    So now David smiled round the table as he thanked Mac-Lean for the excellent advice, and began to talk about the mantelpiece, crammed with some particularly hideous presents from Shanghai and Singapore which the late Captain McDonald had brought home from his voyages.
    It is rather pleasant, I must say,” George began, and then thought better of saying it. They were walking up the winding road which would take them to Dr. MacLntyre’s house.
    “What is?”
    “To see the island from the inside, as it were. I’ve visited this place each summer, but I’ve always left Ma clean at the jetty and then strolled inland.
    But this is the first time I’ve got to know any of them. They are very polite, but very remote to strangers.”
    “Foreigners, you mean.”
    George looked as if he did not like to accept that idea. After all, he was English, and these islands were part of the British Isles. And he had been coming to this part of Scotland each summer for six years now.
    “Well,” he said, ‘they accepted us all right today.”
    “Because we had the right password, I suppose.”
    “Dr. MacLntyre’s name?”
    “I’m afraid so. Quite a blow to admit it wasn’t for our sweet and charming smiles, isn’t it? But cheer up, George: the right password is the key to any fortress. Here it is quite simply a matter of friendship. It wouldn’t have mattered to Mrs. McDonald who we were, or what we did or thought: we came as friends of Dr. MacLntyre’s, and that