Immediately after breakfast the next morning, Mona slung her vasculum over her shoulder, strapped a business-like spud round her waist, tucked a well-worn Hooker under her arm, and set off at a good brisk pace. Contrary to all expectations, the rain still held off; and, as physical exercise brought the blood to her face, the clouds of her depression rolled away like mountain mists in the sunshine.
She kept to the highroad for the first few miles, and then, when she was well past the haunts of men, struck on to the glorious, undulating, sandy dunes.
Botanising was not very easy work now, for most of the plants were in fruit, and sometimes not even the youngest member of an inflorescence persisted, as a pale stray floret, to proclaim the pedigree of its family. But Mona was no tyro in the work, and her vasculum filled up steadily. Moreover, she was not disposed to quarrel with anything to-day, and when she reached the extreme easterly point of the county, and stood all alone at the water's edge, she felt the same sense of exultation and proprietorship that she had experienced on the wild pack-horse track above the Nærodal.
All at once her eye caught sight of some showy purple blossoms. "Eldorado yo he trovado!" she cried. "I verily believe it is a sea-rocket." She transferred it to her vasculum, and seated herself on a rock for a few minutes' rest. She proceeded to undo her packet of sandwiches, singing to herself all the time, as was her habit when light-hearted and quite alone; but the words that came into her head were not always so appropriate as on the occasion of her first visit to the beach; and at the present moment she was proclaiming with all the emphasis befitting a second encore—
"Fo—r he's going to marry Yum-Yum"—
when a sudden intuition made her look round, and, to her horror, she saw two men regarding her with an amused smile.
One was elderly, ruddy, and commonplace; the other was young, sallow, mournful, and interesting. Both carried vasculums a good deal more battered and weather-beaten than Mona's own.
She coloured up to the roots of her hair, and then made the best of the situation, laughing quietly, and proceeding with her sandwiches the while.
The ruddy man lifted his hat with a friendly bow. "But for the nineteenth-century character of your song," he said, "I should have taken you for the nymph of the coast."
"In a go-ahead county like this," said Mona gravely, returning his bow, "even the nymph of the coast is expected to keep pace with the times."
"True," he said. "I had forgotten where I was. Has the nymph of the coast got anything interesting in her vasculum?"
"Nothing really rare, I fear, though I have found a good deal that is new to me. Oh, by the way, I found a plant of penny-cress in some waste ground near Kilwinnie. Is that common here?"
"Thlaspi arvense?" he said sceptically, looking at his sallow companion.
The younger man shook his head. "I never saw it in the neighbourhood," he said.
"I am quite open to conviction, of course," said Mona. and, rummaging in her vasculum, she produced a bunch of large, flat, green "pennies."
"Right," chuckled the elder man triumphantly—"see that?"
"Y-e-s. It's curious I never saw it before—and near Kilwinnie, too. But it seems all right; it is not likely to be a garden escape."
And they proceeded to compare specimens with much interest and enthusiasm.
"We intended to go on a little farther," said the elderly gentleman at last. "As you are botanising also, perhaps you will join us?"
Mona assented gladly, and they walked together a few miles along the coast, before turning back towards Kilwinnie.
"I suppose you have done no microscopic botany?" said her friend suddenly.
This, from Rachel's point of view, was approaching dangerous ground; but she was never likely to see these men again. They did not look like natives.
"Yes, I have done a little," said Mona. "I have attended a botany class."
"Indeed! May I ask where?"
"In London"—and as he still looked at her enquiringly, "at University College," she added.
"Oh! Then you have studied botany! But they did not teach you there to spot Thlaspi arvense?"
"No; I taught myself that before I began to study botany. I think it is a pity that that part of the subject is so much ignored."
"But botany, as taught at present, is much more scientific. Old-fashioned botany—especially as taught to ladies—was a happy combination of pedestrianism and glorified stamp-collecting."
"True," said Mona, "and if one had to choose between the old and the new, one would choose the new without a moment's hesitation; but, on the other hand, it does give the enemy occasion to blaspheme, when a man can tell them that a flower is composite, proterandrous, syngenesious, &c., but when he is quite unable to designate it by its simple name of dandelion."
Both the men laughed.
When they reached Kilwinnie, the elder of the two stopped and held out his hand.
"I am sorry we cannot offer to see you home," he said; "but the fact is, dinner is waiting for me now at the inn, and I start for London to-night. If you are ever in town again, my wife and I will be only too pleased to see you," and he handed her his card.
He did not ask her name, for the simple reason that he had already seen it in the beginning of her Flora.
When Mona looked at the card, she found that she had been spending the afternoon with a scientist of European celebrity.
"If redbeard be that," she said, "what must blackbeard be, and why did he not give me his card too?"
She walked on at a good pace, realising only when she saw the lights of Kirkstoun, how dark it had grown. As she passed the post-office, she saw a knot of men assembled at the counter; for, in an unobtrusive way, the Kirkstoun post-office—which was also a flourishing grocer's shop—served many of the purposes of a club. This it did the more effectually as the only female assistant was a wrinkled and spiteful old woman, whose virgin ears could not be injured by any ordinary masculine gossip.
Scarcely had Mona left this rendezvous behind her when she was overtaken by Dr Dudley.
"You are very late," he said simply.
"Yes, but I have had a glorious time."
"You are tired?"
"Healthily tired."
"Cobwebs all gone?"
"Oh yes! In fact, they had begun to go when I saw you yesterday, or I could not have spoken of them."
"Poor little soul!" he thought to himself, wondering how she escaped melancholia in the narrow limits of her life.
"You did not really mind those vulgar girls yesterday," he went on awkwardly, after a pause.
For a moment she could not think what he was referring to.
"Oh no!" she said at last, with wide-open eyes of wonder. "How could I? They don't come into my world at all. Neither their opinion of me, nor their want of manners, can possibly affect me."
"That is certainly the sensible way to look at it."
"I don't know, after all, whether it is the right way. Probably their vulgarity is all on the surface. I believe there are thousands of girls like that who only want some large-souled woman to take them by the hand, and draw out their own womanhood. How can they help it if their life has been barren of ideals?"
He made a mental survey of the women in the neighbourhood, in search of some one capable of performing such a function.
"What a pity it is that they cannot see you as you are," he said, looking at the dim outline of her face. "Large-souled women do not grow on every hedge."
"Perhaps it would be more to the purpose if I could see myself as they see me," she answered thoughtfully. "After all, with the honestest intentions, we scan our lives as we do our own poetry, laying stress on the right syllables, and passing lightly over a halting foot. You force me to confess that I said some very ill-natured things about those girls after they were gone; and I had not their excuse of being still in the chrysalis stage. They may make better butterflies than I yet. Even a woman can never tell how a girl is going to turn out."
He laughed. "What is bred in the bone—" he said, "Their mother is my ideal of all that is vulgar and pretentious."
"Poor children!" said Mona.
"And the best of it is," he said, "that she began life as a small——"
He stopped short and the blood rushed over his face.
"Well," said Mona quietly, "as a what?"
"Milliner," he said, kicking a stone violently out of his way, in a tempest of anger at his own stupidity.
"You don't mean to say," said Mona, "that you were afraid of hurting my feelings? Oh, please give me credit for having the soul of a human being!"
He walked with her to her own door that night. It was after dark, to be sure, but I am inclined to think that he might have done the same had it been noonday; and when he got home he asked his aunt no more questions about "Miss Simpson's niece.”