Miss Emmeline Macrae was the daughter of the host with whom the Budes and Merton were staying at Skrae Castle, on Loch Skrae, only an easy mile and a half from the sea and the cove beside which Merton and Lady Bude were sitting.

‘There is a seal crawling out on to the shore of the little island!’ said Merton.  ’What a brute a man must be who shoots a seal!  I could watch them all day—­on a day like this.’

‘That is not answering my question,’ said Lady Bude.  ’What do you think of Miss Macrae?  I know what you think!’

’Can a humble person like myself aspire to the daughter of the greatest living millionaire?  Our host can do almost anything but bring a spate, and even that he could do by putting a dam with a sluice at the foot of Loch Skrae:  a matter of a few thousands only.  As for the lady, her heart it is another’s, it never can be mine.’

‘Whose it is?’ asked Lady Bude.

’Is it not, or do my trained instincts deceive me, that of young Blake, the new poet?  Is she not “the girl who gives to song what gold could never buy”?  He is as handsome as a man has no business to be.’

‘He uses belladonna for his eyes,’ said Lady Bude.  ‘I am sure of it.’

’Well, she does not know, or does not mind, and they are pretty inseparable the last day or two.’

‘That is your own fault,’ said Lady Bude; ’you banter the poet so cruelly.  She pities him.’

‘I wonder that our host lets the fellow keep staying here,’ said Merton.  ’If Mr. Macrae has a foible, except that of the pedigree of the Macraes (who were here before the Macdonalds or Mackenzies, and have come back in his person), it is scientific inventions, electric lighting, and his new toy, the wireless telegraph box in the observatory.  You can see the tower from here, and the pole with box on top.  I don’t care for that kind of thing myself, but Macrae thinks it Paradise to get messages from the Central News and the Stock Exchange up here, fifty miles from a telegraph post.  Well, yesterday Blake was sneering at the whole affair.’

‘What is this wireless machine?  Explain it to me,’ said Lady Bude.

‘How can you be so cruel?’ asked Merton.

‘Why cruel?’

’Oh, you know very well how your sex receives explanations.  You have three ways of doing it.’

‘Explain them!’

’Well, the first way is, if a man tries to explain what “per cent” means, or the difference of “odds on,” or “odds against,” that is, if they don’t gamble, they cast their hands desperately abroad, and cry, “Oh, don’t, I never can understand!” The second way is to sit and smile, and look intelligent, and think of their dressmaker, or their children, or their young man, and then to say, “Thank you, you have made it all so clear!"’

‘And the third way?’

’The third way is for you to make it plain to the explainer that he does not understand what he is explaining.’