Page:The time spirit; a romantic tale (IA timespiritromant00snaiiala).pdf/25

 like a mother to every young man. Moreover, Dugald Maclean, as he sat perspiring with nervousness on the edge of a chair much too small for him, seemed to need some large-hearted woman to feel like a mother towards him.

Miss Harriet Sanderson was to blame, no doubt, for the young policeman's aphasia. Her coolness and ease, with a half quizzical, half ironical look surmounting it, seemed to increase the bashfulness of Dugald Maclean whenever he ventured to look at her out of the tail of his eye.

It was clear that the young man was suffering acutely. Nature had intended him to be expansive—not in the Sassenach sense perhaps,—but given the time and the place and a right conjunction of the planets, Dugald Maclean had social gifts, at least they were so assessed at Carrickmachree in his native Caledonia. Moreover, he was rather proud of them. He was an ambitious and gifted young police officer. For many moons he had been looking forward to this romantic hour. Since a first chance meeting with the semi-divine Miss Sanderson he had been living in the hope of a second, yet now by the courtesy of Providence it was granted to him he might never have seen a woman before.

The lips of Constable Maclean were dry, his tongue clove to the roof of an amazingly capacious mouth. As for Miss Sanderson, mere silence began to achieve wonders in the way of gentle, smiling irony. But the hostess was more humane. For one thing she was married, and although Fate had been cruel, she had a sacred instinct which made her regard every young man as a boy of her own.