r uncle's
advice and found life quite supportable in consequence. She knew she had
waited for Mackenzie's name to be mentioned at luncheon and had blushed
when she heard it, only, fortunately, nobody had seen her, not even the
sharp-eyed twins. She would have resented it intensely if her interest
and her blush had been noticed, and put down to personal attraction. It
was not that at all. She rather disliked the man, with his keen,
hawklike face, his piercing eyes, and his direct, unvarnished speech. He
was the sort of man of whom a woman might have reason to be afraid if
she were, by unaccountable mischance, attracted by him, and he by her.
He would dominate her and she would be at least as much of a chattel as
in the hands of a male Clinton. It was what he stood for that interested
her, and she could not help comparing his life with that of her father
and her brothers, or of Jim Graham, much to the disadvantage of her own
kind.

Her resentment, if it deserved that name, had fixed itself upon her
father and brothers, and Jim shared in it. He was just the same as they
were, making the little work incumbent on him as easy as possible and
spending the best part of his life in the pursuits he liked best. She
had come to the conclusion that there was no place for her in such a
life as that. When Jim proposed to her, as she felt sure he would do
when he was ready, she would refuse him. She felt now that she really
could not go through with it, and her determination to refuse to marry
Jim rose up in her mind and fixed itself as she sat in her chair under
the tree. If he had been a poor man, with a profession to work at, she
would have married him and found her happiness in helping him on. She
wanted the life. The food and the raiment were nothing to her, either at
Kencote or Mountfield.

CHAPTER XIII

RONALD MACKENZIE

Cicely rose from her seat and strolled across the lawn, through an iron
gate and a flower-garden, and on to another lawn verging on the
shrubberies. Joan and Nancy were employed here in putting tennis balls
into a hole with the handles of walking sticks. Cicely rebuked them,
for, according to his lights, the Squire was a strict Sabbatarian.

"Darling!" expostulated Joan, in a voice of pleading, "we are not using
putters and golf balls. There _can't_ be any harm in this."

Cicely did not think there was, and passed on through the shrubbery walk
to where a raised path skirting a stone wall afforded