“I met him the other day,” she answered. “He’s a friend of my father’s. Oh, yes, I remember now: he said he had a relation out here in the Guards.”
“Yes,” he replied, with his mouth full. “He’s a cousin; but I hardly know him. He’s spent much of his life in the States.”
“Tell me about him,” she said. She was all interest.
“I don’t know anything to tell you,” he answered, casually. “He’s a crank—lives with the niggers in the desert or something. Looks like a tramp.”
“He’s very clever, isn’t he? My father thinks the world of him.”
Lord Barthampton noisily threw down his knife and fork. “There’s not much love lost between him and me,” he said, and relapsed into silence; while Muriel, seeing that she had touched upon a sore subject, took the opportunity to resume her conversation with her partner.
Late that evening, after the guests had departed, Muriel, prompted by a sense of duty, found herself in the library, bidding a motherly good-night to her father, who was smoking a final cigar, and was standing before the empty fireplace, his hands under his coattails in unconscious retention of the habits of other days.
“By the way,” she said, “did you know that Lord Barthampton was Daniel Lane’s cousin?”
“You don’t say so!” he exclaimed. “Well, well! I had no idea.”
He opened a bookcase, and lifting out Burke’s Peerage, turned over its pages with evident interest. After a few moment’s study, he uttered a little ejaculation.