“Lord, what a place!” he said to himself, half critically, half affectionately.
The old castle of Stanesland was but a small house as castles, or even mansions, go, almost devoid of architectural ornament and evidently built in a sterner age simply for security, and but little embellished by the taste of more degenerate times. As a specimen of a small early 15th Century castle it was excellent; as a home it was inconvenience incarnate. How so many draughts found their way through such thick walls was a perennial mystery, and how to convey dishes from the kitchen to the dining room without their getting cold an almost insoluble problem.
The laird and his sister sat down to lunch and in about ten minutes Miss Cromarty remarked,
“So you drove Cicely Farmond home?”
Her brother nodded. He had mentioned the fact as soon as he came in, and rather wondered why she referred to it again.
Miss Cromarty smiled her own peculiar shrewd worldly little smile, and said:
“You are very silent, Ned.”
Lilian Cromarty was a few years older than her brother; though one would hardly have guessed it. Her trim figure, bright eyes, vivacity of expression when she chose to be vivacious, and quick movements might have belonged to a woman twenty years younger. She had never been pretty, but she was always perfectly dressed and her smile could be anything she chose to make it. Until her youngest brother came into the property, the place had been let and she had lived with her friends and relations. She had had a good time, she always frankly confessed, but as frankly admitted that it was a relief to settle down at last.
“I was thinking,” said her brother.
“About Cicely?” she asked in her frankly audacious way.
He opened his eyes for a moment and then laughed.
“You needn’t guess again, Lilian,” he admitted.
“Funny little thing,” she observed.
“Funny?” he repeated, and his tone brought an almost imperceptible change of expression into his sister’s eye.
“Oh,” she said as though throwing the subject aside, “she is nice and quite pretty, but very young, and not very sophisticated; is she? However, I should think she would be a great success as a man’s girl. That low voice and those eyes of hers are very effective. Pass me the salt, Ned.”
Ned looked at her in silence, and then over her shoulder out through the square window set in the vast thickness of the wall, to the grey horizon line.
“I guess you’ve recommended me to marry once or twice, Lilian,” he observed.
“Don’t ‘guess’ please!” she laughed, “or I’ll stick my bowie knife or gun or something into you! Yes, I’ve always advised you to marry—if you found the right kind of wife.”
She took some credit to herself for this disinterested advice, since, if he took it, the consequences would be decidedly disconcerting to herself; but she had never pointed out any specific lady yet, or made any conspicuous effort to find one for him.
“Well—” he began, and then broke off.
“You’re not thinking of Cicely, are you?” she asked, still in the same bright light way, but with a quick searching look at him.
“It seems a bit absurd. I don’t imagine for an instant she’d look at me.”
“Wouldn’t look—!” she began derisively, and then pulled herself up very sharply, and altered her tactics on the instant. “She might think you a little too old for her,” she said in a tone of entire agreement with him.
“And also that I’ve got one too few eyes, and in fact several other criticisms.”
His sister shrugged her shoulders.
“A girl of that age might think those things,” she admitted, “but it seems to me that the criticism ought to be on the other side. Who is she?”
Ned looked at her and she broke into a laugh.
“Well,” she said, “I suppose we both have a pretty good idea. She’s somebody’s something—Alfred Cromarty’s, I believe; though of course her mother may have fibbed, for she doesn’t look much like the Cromartys. Anyhow that pretty well puts her out of the question.”
“Why?”
“If you were a mere nobody, it mightn’t make so much difference, but your wife must have some sort of a family behind her. One needn’t be a snob to think that one mother and a guess at the father is hardly enough!”
“After all, that’s up to me. I wouldn’t be wanting to marry her great-mothers, even if she had any.”
She shrugged her shoulders again.
“My dear Ned, I’m no prude, but there’s always some devilment in the blood in these cases.”
“Rot!” said he.
“Well, rot if you like, but I know more than one instance.”
He said nothing for a moment and as he sat in silence, a look of keen anxiety came into her eye. She hid it instantly and compressed her lips, and then abruptly her brother said:
“I wonder whether she’s at all taken up with Malcolm Cromarty!”
She ceased to meet his eye, and her own became expressionless.
“They have spent some months in the same house. At their age the consequences seem pretty inevitable.”
She had contrived to suggest a little more than she said, and he started in his chair.
“What do you know?” he demanded.
“Oh, of course, there would be a dreadful row if anything was actually known abroad. Sir Reginald has probably other ideas for his heir.”
“Then there is something between them?”
She nodded, and though she still did not meet his eye, he accepted the nod with a grim look that passed in a moment into a melancholy laugh.
“Well,” he said, rising, “it was a pretty absurd idea anyhow. I’ll go and have a look at myself in the glass and try to see the funny side of it!”
His sister sat very still after
