Mr. Dunn bowed twice, and deeply, before Lady Augusta, and then, passing across the room, shook hands warmly with Sybella.
“How did you find the roads, Dunn?” asked his Lordship, still fishing about for some stray word of apology; “rather heavy, I fear, at this season.”
“Capital roads, my Lord, and excellent horses. We came along at a rate which would have astonished the lumbering posts of the Continent.”
“Dinner, my Lord,” said the butler, throwing wide the folding-doors.
“Will you give Lady Augusta your arm, Dunn?” said Lord Glengariff, as he offered his own to Miss Kellett.
“We have changed our dinner-room, Mr. Dunn,” said Lady Augusta, as they walked along; thus by a mere word suggesting “bygones and long ago.”
“And with advantage, I should say,” replied he, easily, as he surveyed the spacious and lofty apartment into which they had just entered. “The old dinner-room was low-ceilinged and gloomy.”
“Do you really remember it?” asked she, with a pleasant smile.
“An over-good memory has accompanied me through life, Lady Augusta,” said he. And then, as he remarked the rising color of her cheek, quickly added, “It is rarely that the faculty treats me to such grateful recollections as the present.”
Lord Glengariffs table was a good specimen of country-house living. All the materials were excellent, and the cookery reasonably good; his wine was exquisite,—the years and epochs connoisseurship loves to dwell upon; but Mr. Dunn ate sparingly and drank little. He had passed forty without gourmand tastes, and no man takes to epicurism after that. His Lordship beheld, not without secret dissatisfaction, his curdiest salmon declined, his wonderful “south-down” sent away scarcely tasted, and, horror of horrors! saw water mixed with his 1815 claret as if it were a “little Bordeaux wine” at a Swiss table d'hôte.