“But you are, my lord, I’m afraid!” said the groom.
“Not a bit,” said Lord Cecil, with a smile, and he hurried across the courtyard, and up the stone steps to the terrace.
The long walk, laid in Carrara marble, and running the whole length of the house, was perfectly empty, and everything was suspiciously quiet.
“They’ve begun dinner,” said Lord Cecil, with a shrug of his shoulders. “That’s unpleasant! I don’t know my uncle very intimately, but I have a shrewd suspicion that he is the sort of man to cut up rough! Well, no, I don’t suppose he would be rough if I burned the place down, but he’d be unpleasantly smooth.”
He hurried along, past a long line of windows, screened by their curtains, and then past one through which the light came in innumerable streaks of color—it was the stained oriel window—and at last reached the great hall.
A groom of the chambers, attired in a dark purple livery that looked almost like a court suit, came forward with something like solemn gravity.
“I’m late, eh?” said Lord Cecil, and his clear, young voice, musical as it was, sounded large and loud in the solemn, subdued air of the place.
“Dinner has been served twenty-two minutes, my lord,” was the grave reply.
“Oh! hang the two minutes,” said Lord Cecil, “I shan’t be long.” And he bounded up the stairs, apparently to the amazement of the official and a couple of stately footmen, who looked after him with surprise. It took him some two or three minutes to reach his room. The Towers was a huge place, but which, huge as it was, the marquis only dwelt in for a month or two once in three or four years—he had so many other and huger places—and Lord Cecil found his valet waiting for him.
“Look sharp, Parkins,” he said, slipping off his coat. “I’m awfully late. Has the marquis inquired for me?”