“Another sip of that wine. I always liked wine—but not too much of it.”
She beckoned to him to come nearer. “Quincy, I want you, before you go away to have the fish cleared out of the lake. Stuart wouldn't let me do it, and since he died I have kept them as a tribute to his memory. He said to me, when the name dies out, let the fish die too. The name is near death, and the fish must go. Now, send Alice to me.”
When she came, she bent over and kissed her aunt tenderly.
“Alice, I wish you were going with me. You know what I mean, dear. I hope you will have long life and great happiness to make up for what you've gone through. You have your husband back again. I am going to mine, Robert and Stuart. There is no marriage or giving in marriage there—only love. Quincy is going to look after the fish in the lake.”
Aunt Ella lingered for a week, then passed quietly away while asleep. She was laid beside Sir Stuart in the family vault, and the name Fernborough lived only as that of a little country town in New England.
At the funeral Quincy met his sister Florence who looked upon him as one raised from the dead.
“I did not forget you, Quincy, for my first-born bears your name.”
Linda, Countess of Sussex, came with her husband the Earl, and her daughter, the Lady Alice Hastings, a tall, statuesque blonde, in her twenty-eighth year.
“I've something wonderful to tell you,” said the Countess to Quincy and his wife. “My daughter is soon to be married, but not to one of our set. Her choice has fallen upon Mr. John Langdon, an American. He's very wealthy, and is coming to England to live. Isn't that romantic—so out of the usual.”
“America loses every time,” said Quincy. “First our girls and their father's money, and now our men and their money. In time, England will form part of the great American nation.”