“Yes. She is very beautiful, is she not?” returned the squire, dreamily.
“Hum!” observed Sir Douglas to himself. “She may be; but——”
The sentence was left unfinished, and the strange guest followed the squire into the house.
“How unchanged it all is!” he remarked, as he entered the great hall. “I seem to have stepped back into my boyhood again, Sholto. Ah, we don’t wear as well as bricks and mortar, old fellow! Only a few short years, and we are both wrecks of what we were!”
They had entered a smaller apartment at the back of the building, one used by the squire as his study and own special sanctum. Books and pamphlets were carelessly strewn about; and the room, in its plain appointments, told clearly and distinctly the character of its owner.
The squire pushed forward a large chair to the window, and Sir Douglas, throwing off his hat, seated himself in it, whilst the squire settled himself at the table.
“Did my letter startle you?” asked Sir Douglas suddenly.
“Yes, it did,” was the candid answer. “I had begun to think you would never return to England, that you would die as you have lived, a wanderer from your home.”
“A weary, restless wanderer—a man, Sholto, with but one thought in his mind, one desire in his wanderings, one wish that has never been fulfilled. Ah, you have judged me as the world has judged me, an ill-conditioned fellow who loved all nations and people above his own! But you have wronged me—the world has wronged me. I am as capable of strong domestic feeling as any man living. I am what I am through trickery and deceit.”
The squire gazed earnestly at his cousin’s face, the thin features illumined by a sudden rush of color. Sir Douglas turned, and, as his eyes met that earnest gaze, he sunk back slowly in his chair, and the old cynical look came back again.