“Now let us talk this matter out quietly and in as few words as possible,” Lord Carthew began, drawing a chair to his friend’s bedside. “What does it matter to you for twenty-four hours what they call you? You will probably never see any of these people again. I have introduced us both in one set of names to Miss Cranstoun, and she has passed us on under those names to the doctor and to her mother. It’s impossible to go back now. You had agreed to the arrangement which we started earlier in the day. There is no reason why we should not play our little comedy out just because an unlucky accident has intervened.”
“I utterly decline to be a party to such nonsense,” exclaimed Hilary, angrily, the blood rushing to his face. “It’s all very well for you. A man who assumes a rank lower than his own is at worst a romantic fool; but a commoner who tries to pass himself off as a lord is a paltry cad, and it’s a situation I won’t fill for a single moment.”
“You can’t alter things now, as I said before,” Lord Carthew urged. “When it comes out—I should say, if it comes out at any time that we have changed places—I shall own up that it was a foolish freak of mine, carried out in spite of your opposition. Now lie still and try to go to sleep, there’s a good fellow. I can’t eat a second dinner, and I’m certainly not in drawing-room trim. Still I want to see as much of my—or rather of your—relatives as I can while we’re here, so that unless there’s anything I can do for you——”
“There’s certainly something you can do,” roared the wounded man, “and that at once. You must contradict your former ridiculous statement, and explain our true positions instantly to Miss Cranstoun and her mother. Otherwise, I shall get out of bed and go downstairs and do it myself, in spite of all the doctors in England.”
Almost before he had finished speaking, Lord Carthew had left the room, so quickly indeed that he barely escaped stumbling over the kneeling form of the servant outside the door, who immediately affected to be occupied in straightening the mat. He was extremely sorry for Hilary’s accident, and most anxious to see him well out of it. But he was also already fathoms deep in love, and longing to feast his eyes upon Miss Cranstoun again; besides had not the doctor declared that Hilary would be all right provided that fever did not follow, and that he must not be allowed to excite himself by talking?
In the oak-panelled dining-room, Lord Carthew found three persons seated at dinner, and he was instantly struck by the utter absence of resemblance between Lady Cranstoun and the young girl whom he supposed to be her daughter. The former was just such a Douglas as he had described to Hilary; tall, sandy-haired, and limp, with a thin face, a high nose and colorless blue-gray eyes under white lashes, a perfectly well-bred and entirely uninteresting personage of about eight-and-forty years of age, in gray silk, shrouded by a voluminous white knitted shawl of Shetland wool.
She gave Lord Carthew a long, nerveless, white hand in greeting, and inquired after his friend, expressing her regret at the accident. Even while answering her polite inquiries, Claud’s eyes involuntarily travelled to the face of Miss Cranstoun, who, dressed in a girlish dinner costume of ivory silk, sat beside Dr. Morland Graham. In the lamplight she looked even more attractive than in the half-obscurity in which he had before seen her. Her cheeks had but little color as contrasted with the vivid scarlet of her lips, but to Lord Carthew’s keenly observant eyes, this pallor, and the extraordinary brightness of her eyes, suggested in no way ill health, but rather a vivid and ardent nature under strong repression. Her gown was cut low about the throat, and the sleeves were little more than elbow length, showing off the fairness and purity of her skin and the delicacy of her slim wrists. A turquoise brooch was her only ornament, and seemed to carry out in color the intense blue of her eyes between the black pupils and the nearly purple borders to the iris. Her whole appearance was poetic and interesting in a high degree, but the young viscount remarked that her manner had lost something of its naïve frankness, and had become more sedate and restrained than before.
“I am the more interested in Lord Carthew,” Lady Cranstoun was saying, “because we are connections. Lord Northborough’s mother was a Douglas, and my aunt.”
She spoke in slow, unmusical tones, with a slight Scotch accent. Lord Carthew rightly judged that, being a Douglas, she would have an exaggerated pride of birth, which was indeed the poor lady’s chief weakness. A single question from him sufficed to start her on her favorite subject of the numerous marriages and relationships of her father, the Duke of Lanark’s, family. As her appetite was poor, and no one could be rude enough to interrupt her at her own table, she was soon deep in the intricacies of the Douglas ancestry and Douglas marriages, while Dr. Graham set himself steadily to enjoy the good fare before him, and Miss Cranstoun kept her eyes steadily fixed on her plate, her cheeks flushed, and her dark eyebrows contracted with annoyance.
The dinner was good, the wines were few but excellent, and the greater part of the table service was in solid old silver, adorned with the motto “Cranstoun, Remember,” and the mailed hand grasping a wolf’s head, which was the family device. Opposite Lord Carthew, as he sat at table, there hung a portrait of a man in armor, whose sinister light eyes seemed to follow his every movement. Look which way he would, from Stella Cranstoun’s beautiful face to the doctor’s plump, bland visage, or Lady Cranstoun’s washed-out countenance, Lord Carthew found his gaze fascinated and held by the pale, square, inscrutable face of the man in armor, about whose narrow, close-shut lips a bitter smile seemed to be playing.