The sole end of all my Aunt Jessica’s manoeuvring is to marry me to Dora, and Dora, like Barkis, is willing.  Marry Dora!  The thought is a febrifuge, a sudorific!  She would be thumping discords on my wornout strings all day long.  In a month I should be a writhing madman.  I would sooner, infinitely sooner, marry Carlotta.  Carlotta is nature; Dora isn’t even art.  Why, in the name of men and angels, should I marry Dora?  And why (save to call herself Lady Ordeyne) should she want to marry me?  I have not trifled with her virgin affections; and that she is nourishing a romantic passion for me of spontaneous growth I decline to believe.  For aught I care she can be as inconsolable as Calypso.  It will do her good.  She can write a little story about it in The Sirens’ Magazine.

I am shocked.  For all her bouncing ways and animal health and incorrect information, I thought Dora was a nice-minded girl.

Do nice-minded girls hunt husbands?

Good heavens!  This looks like the subject of a silly-season correspondence in The Daily Telegraph.

CHAPTER XI

July 19th.

Campsie, N.B. Hither have I fled from my buccaneering relations.  I am seeking shelter in a manse in the midst of a Scotch moor, and the village, half a mile away, is itself five miles from a railway station.  Here I can defy Aunt Jessica.

After my conversation with Pasquale, I passed a restless night.  My slumbers were haunted by dreams of pirate yachts flying the jolly Roger, on which the skull and crossbones melted grotesquely into a wedding-ring and a true lovers’ knot.  I awoke to the conviction that so long as the vessel remained on English waters I could find no security in London.  I resolved on flight.  But whither?

Verily the high gods must hold me in peculiar favour.  The first letter I opened was from old Simon McQuhatty, my present host, a godfather of my mother, who alone of mortals befriended us in the dark days of long ago.  He was old and infirm, he wrote, and Gossip Death was waiting for him on the moor; but before he went to join him he would like to see Susan’s boy again.  I could come whenever I liked.  A telegram from Euston before I started would be sufficient notice.  I sent Stenson out with a telegram to say I was starting that very day by the two o’clock train, and I wrote a polite letter to my Aunt Jessica informing her of my regret at not being able to accept her kind invitation as I was summoned to Scotland for an indefinite period.