Page:JM Barrie--My lady nicotine.djvu/123

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THE ARCADIA MIXTURE AGAIN.
119

pipe of the Mixture, "the affair ends; though I dare say the young lady will call me terrible names when she hears that I have personated her lover. I must take care to avoid the father now, for he will feel that I have been following him. Perhaps I should have made a clean breast of it; but I do loathe explanations."

Two days afterward Scrymgeour passed the father and daughter on the river. The lady said "Thank you" to him with her eyes, and, still more remarkable, the old gentleman bowed. Scrymgeour thought it over. "She is grateful to me," he concluded, "for drawing away suspicion from the other man, but what can have made the father so amiable? Suppose she has not told him that I am an impostor, he should still look upon me as a villain; and if she has told him, he should be still more furious. It is curious, but no affair of mine." Three times within the next few days he encountered the lady on the tow-path or elsewhere with a young gentleman of empty countenance, who, he saw must be the real Lothario. Once they passed him when he was in the shadow of a tree, and the lady was making pretty faces with a cigarette in her mouth. The house-boat Heathen Chinee lay but a short distance off, and Scrymgeour could see the owner gazing after his daughter placidly, a pipe between his lips. "He must be approving of her