She hurried away, and he stood looking after her for a few moments.
“Poor thing!” he said, as he went on. “What trouble to have to bear. Hang it all, I wouldn’t change places with Gartram if I could.”
He went on, thinking deeply about Glyddyr.
“The old man seems to have quite taken to that fellow, and did from the first time he came here with his yacht. Regular sporting chap. Wins heavily on the turf. Bound to say he loses, too. Three hundred thousand pounds, they say, he had when his father died. Well, good luck to him! I hadn’t when mine passed away.”
Chris began to whistle softly as he went on, stopping once to pick a flower from out of a niche where the water trickled down from a crack in the granite, and, farther on, taking out a tiny lens to inspect a fly. Then another botanical specimen took his attention, and was transferred to a pocket-book, and by that time he was up at the castellated gateway and bridge over the well-filled moat of the Fort.
He went up to the entrance, with its nail-studded oaken door, just as he had been hundreds of times before since boyhood, rang, and walked into the hall before the servant had time to answer the bell.
“Anybody at home?” he said carelessly.
“Yes, sir; master’s in the study, and the ladies are in the drawing-room.”
“Mr Gartram well enough to see me, I suppose?”
“Oh, yes, sir. Doctor Asher was here to breakfast, and master’s going out.”