is heart seemed like a great hot fire as he left her. He knew he had
broken all conventions, and acted like a madman; he knew that whatever
she had felt towards him before, her feelings towards him now must be
of utter scorn and derision, and yet he would not recall one word he
had spoken, even if he could. He was glad that he had said these wild,
incoherent things to her. He had spoken to her, she had spoken to him.
In the future she would think of him, not as a nonentity, not as
someone who could be easily passed by, but as one whose life meant
something. She would never be able to forget him. He knew it and
rejoiced in it! She would be reminded of him by a thousand things in
the days to come. She would never be indifferent about him again, and
throughout the whole of the contest that was coming on she would regard
him differently from the way in which she had thought of him before.
Somehow, too, he felt less jealous of Ned Wilson. He had not spoken of
this man, who was said to be his rival, but he was in the background of
his thoughts all the time. For weeks the stories which the gossips had
bandied had wounded him, but now he felt different. After their talk
this girl would never think of Ned Wilson; she could not. He did not
belong to her order of beings. He breathed a different atmosphere, he
spoke a different language, lived in a different world.

The next day Paul started for Scotland, to try and discover the truth
concerning which his mother had told him.

CHAPTER VI

PAUL GOES TO SCOTLAND

When Mary Bolitho returned to Howden Clough that evening she went
straight to her own room. She wanted to be alone. Under ordinary
circumstances she would have, girl-like, sought out her friend, Emily
Wilson, and given her a full report of what had taken place, but her
desire was for silence rather than for speech. In spite of her anger she
felt that there was something sacred in what this young man had said to
her. There could be no doubt that he felt strongly, and she knew, by the
tones of his voice and the look in his eyes, that he was greatly moved.
Of course, she felt indignant that he should dare to speak to her at all,
and she wondered why she had resolved to say nothing to her father about
their meeting. When all allowances had been made, he had been rude in
the extreme. He had stopped her in a lonely part of the countryside, and
had roughly commanded her to listen to him! And Mary Bolitho