Colin leaned forward in his chair. He was aware of the prodigious nature of what he was meaning to say. “Give me Stanier, Raymond,” he said. “With what father is leaving me, and with what Aunt Hester is leaving me, I can easily afford to keep it up. I don’t ask you for any money. I just want Stanier. Of course, it needn’t actually be mine. But I want to live here, while you live somewhere else. There’s the Derbyshire house, for instance. I’ve got Stanier in my blood. If, on father’s death, you’ll do that, there’s nothing I won’t do for you.”
He paused.
“I can do a good deal, you know,” he said. “And I can refrain from doing a good deal.”
The proposal was so preposterous that Raymond fairly laughed. Instantly Colin got up.
“That sounds pleasant,” he said. “Good night, Raymond. I wouldn’t have any more whisky, if I were you. Father seemed to think you’d had enough drink before the end of dinner.”
CHAPTER II
Breakfast at Stanier was a shade less stately than dinner. The table was invariably laid for the complete tale of its possible consumers, and a vicarious urn bubbled at the end of the board with an empty teapot in front of it, in case of old Lady Yardley coming down to breakfast and dispensing tea. She had not come down for over twenty years, but the urn still awaited her ministrations.
On the arrival of tidings that she was having breakfast in her room, the urn was taken away, and if news filtered through the butler to the footman that some one else was breakfasting upstairs, a place at the table was removed. Hot dishes above spirit-lamps stood in a row on the sideboard, and there remained till somebody had come down or till, from the removal of knives and forks, it was clear that nobody was coming.
But when Lady Hester was in the house, these dishes were always sure of a partaker, for, after her cold bath, she breakfasted downstairs, as she considered her bedroom a place to sleep and dress in, not to eat in. The urn would have been removed by this time, for Lady Yardley’s maid would have taken her tray upstairs, and for Lady Hester and for any one else who appeared there was brought in a separate equipage of tea or coffee, hot and fresh, and deposited in front of the occupied chair.
This morning she was the first to arrive, dressed in a white coat and blouse and a jaunty little straw hat turned up at the back and decorated with pheasants’ feathers. Provision of fish and bacon was brought her, and an ironed copy of a daily paper. There were still four places left at the table unremoved, and she promised herself a chatty breakfast.