"Why, I saw piles of gold on your table when I went up to the inn with Miss Greta's note yesterday!"
"Yes; I'd got it out for her—all I had."
Miss von Schwarzenberg was leaning against the back of the settle. "What a pity!" she said quietly. "I wish I'd known you wanted gold."
"But, dear Greta, I said—"
"Did you? I couldn't have taken it in. It's gone now. To a poor person in desperate straits—A stranded American. That was why I borrowed it."
"Bor-ch-rowed it," she said, with the vanishing "ch" like a ghost of the final sound in the Scots word "loch."
Captain Colin was looking at her from under his thick, whitey-yellow eyebrows—in spite of the fact that his father was talking to him very earnestly about the tactics of the German Army. Beyond a doubt, consciousness of Miss Greta's foreignness was growing. Her slight burring of the "r" had never sounded so marked as it did to-day. For all her long residence in the States, Miss Greta was far more German than anybody in the Kirklamont circle had quite realized until the war. And now very plainly this "Germanism" was taking its place as a bar to conversation, a something still not productive of hostility so much as of gêne.
"I'd be so grateful, my dear," Lady McIntyre said half aside to Nan, "if you'd make Greta bathe her temples and lie down."
"Yes, let us go. All this—" Nan looked round the hall through a sudden bewilderment of compunction which fell like a veil over her brightness—"all this is dreadful for you."
"For me! Oh, no!"—Miss Greta held her head higher than ever—"it's not dreadful for me." She smiled a little fiercely,—to Napier's sense—as she left the hall, Madge on one side and Nan on the other.