"Well, I offered to take him out, but he said his waterproof wasn't waterproof. What the dickens does a man mean by coming to the West Highlands without a waterproof? One doesn't expect anything else in a woman, of course, but a man!"
Lady George dried her eyes disconsolately. "Oh! it is no use, George, importing the antagonism of sex into the matter. It is bad enough without that. If we only had a billiard-room I could manage. Do you know I think it quite criminal to build a house in the country without one."
"There are the Kindergarten toys, my dear," suggested her husband; "the children seem to have tired of them."
"Oh, don't try to be funny, please!" retorted his wife; "that would be the last straw. And nurse says it is because they cannot get out that they are so cross. Just when I was counting on them, too, as a distraction."
"Well, Blazes was that effectually this morning," replied her husband, with an air of conviction; "he howled straight on end for two hours, and when I went into the nursery to see what was up, I found the poor little beggar sobbing over some grievance or another."
Lady George flushed up. "It was only because he couldn't come down with the others--I really can't have him; he is so unreasonable, and Mrs. Woodward doesn't believe in my system."
"Never mind, my dear Blanche," said her brother, consolingly. "It seems to answer nicely with good children, and children ought to be good, you know. And the barometer is going up, it really is."
"For wind, I suppose," replied his sister, tragically. Apparently it was for wind; at any rate, Will Cameron coming up to see the laird on business next day observed casually that this must be about the end of it; an optimistic remark which has a certain definite significance in a land of gales. Even the sportsmen were driven to the cold comfort of examining the action of each other's weapons with veiled contempt, discussing the respective merits of each other's accoutrements, from cartridge cases to leggings, and trying to forget that the wild weather was making the birds still wilder than they had been already. It appeared to have the same effect upon humanity. Sam Woodward, who had been a thorn in poor Lady George's side from the beginning, fell out with the only man who could tolerate him, and thereafter told his sister it was a beastly hole, and that he meant to make the mater give him some oof, when he would cut and run to some place where they weren't so beastly stuck up. Mr. Woodward, senior, after roaming about disconsolately waiting for the post, was only appeased by Lady George's suggestion that he would be doing yeoman's service to the cause of civilisation if he composed a letter to the Postmaster-General, calling attention to the disgraceful irregularity in her Majesty's mails to Gleneira; whereupon he retired into the library and wasted several sheets of foolscap.
It was on the children, however, that the weather had the most disastrous effect; so much so that Lord George, returning in the afternoon from a blow with Paul--whose patience had given way over a point-blank refusal on the under footman's part to stop another hour if he was not allowed a fire in his room before dinner--found his wife in the nursery standing helplessly before Blazes, who, in his flannel nightgown, was seated stolidly on the floor. Adam and Eve, meanwhile, were eyeing the scene from their beds, where, however, they had a liberal supply of toys.
"Oh, George!" she cried appealingly, "he has such a hard, hard heart; and I am sure he must get it from your side of the family, so do you think you could do anything with him?"