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He continued to arrange his side of the chess board, still with his king and queen reversed; but Olivia made no effort to set hers. He had burnt himself, she could tell. How obstinate and crazy and generally incalculable men could be!
Miss Stewart seemed to share this unspoken opinion. “I have no patience with you!” she declared, suddenly coming and standing over her brother, and looking as if a very little more would cause her to withdraw his other hand from its seclusion in his coat pocket. “And what is that child about? I suppose I must needs go myself.” She went, and the chess players were left alone.
“You have not set your pieces, I see, Miss Campbell,” observed Ian in a business-like tone. “Or is it that you will not play with me again?”
“I certainly cannot play with you until you have had your hand dressed,” said Olivia gravely.
“But I can make the moves equally well with my left. Or, for the matter of that, and to prove to you that it is unhurt, with my right.” And he plucked his other hand out of his pocket and laid it on the table by the chess board. “You see, all this to-do is about nothing, but, as I say, Grizel dearly loves——”
He got no further. Two swift, cool hands had his imprisoned as it lay there, and fingers, with incredible gentleness in their touch, were pushing the scorched cuff away from his red and blistered wrist. “Mr. Stewart, look at that!” said an accusing voice. “Now, was it worth it!”
(“If you will keep your fingers there, yes, it was worth it, a thousand times worth!”) thought Ian. They were snowflakes . . . snowdrops . . . and what were the grey eyes—soft now, not sparkling—which looked at him so reproachfully? It was not the pain of the burn which made his head swim as he ventured to meet them, and the chessmen dance wildly for a second or two in the firelight. Ah, beautiful and kind, and for ever impossible to love, you shall not know that it is my heart which you have between those healing hands of yours!
“. . . But you see how little damage has been done,” he said, and knew not how dazedly he spoke. He tried to summon up resolution to draw his hand away. And there was a moment’s silence; only the fire crackled, and, without, the wind flung itself against the glass. Then Grizel came in, and Jacqueline after her.
Ian rose to his feet at once. He did not intend any ministrations to be carried out in here. “I’ll come with you as meek as a sheep,” he said quickly, “if Miss Campbell will but excuse me. Jacqueline, will you not stay with our guest?” And he followed his elder sister out.
“Do you think my brother’s hand is much burnt, Miss Campbell?” asked Jacqueline a little anxiously.
Olivia was thoughtfully fingering a chessman. “It was not his hand; it was his wrist. I wish he had not been so rash. If I may say so, one would not have expected it of him.”
“But one is never quite sure what Ian may not do,” explained Jacqueline, sitting down in Ian’s place. “He appears so composed, and then suddenly he is not composed.—But when I say that one is not sure what he may not do, pray do not think I mean that he would ever do anything dishonourable—that he would, for instance, ever forsake a friend.”
“I hope we should none of us do that,” said Miss Campbell.
“No, indeed! Yet I meant something more than that. . . . I do not know how to put it.”
“You mean perhaps, Miss Stewart, that he would never forsake a cause,” suggested Olivia, leaning forward with her elbows on the table. “I do not forget that you are all Jacobites.—Perhaps you mean also that he would never forgive an enemy?”
“I don’t know,” said little Jacqueline, looking troubled. “We ought all to forgive our enemies, ought we not?—But perhaps I do mean that.”
“Yet I hope Mr. Stewart will forgive me for that burn,” said Olivia with a whimsical little smile. “You must intercede for me, Miss Jacqueline!”
“Oh, dear Miss Campbell, the burn was Grizel’s fault, I think, not yours!”
“Then I hope he will forgive me for having called attention to the injury, for it was undoubtedly I who did that in the first place, and he was not best pleased, I think.”
“Men,” pronounced nineteen-year old Jacqueline with a great air of experience, “are very strange creatures in that respect. For if you neglect to notice their injuries they do not like that neither.”
“In short,” said Olivia laughing, “we women are the only sensible sex. (Yet men say that we are not over faithful to our friends.) Come, let us put away the chessmen, for something tells me that your brother will not come back, although he challenged me to another game.”
And in this prediction Miss Campbell found herself perfectly correct.
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