What would Effie have thought or done, I wonder, had she known that at this very moment Leonard’s ship lay safe at Leith, and that not only he, but Douglas and Captain Blunt, were making all the haste that could be made in a chaise and pair towards Glen Lyle?
On the arrival of the Gloaming Star, our heroes first and foremost did something which may not accord with my readers’ idea of romance. A most useful and most needful something it was. They paid a visit to a West End tailor. Before doing so, however, they went to Captain Lyle’s lawyer.
The old man—he was very old—did not at first know Leonard, but as soon as he did, he shook hands with him over and over again. He was almost childlike in his joy to see him again.
“What will your father say?” he cried, “and all of them, all of them?”
Of course Leonard had a dozen questions to ask, and what a big sigh of relief he got rid of, when told that not only were all of them well, including Peter and Peter’s pike, which by some means or another—considered supernatural by Peter—was once more all alive and plunging, but that the estate of Glen Lyle was free again, and that Captain Fitzroy had rented one of the farms, thus figuratively, if not literally, turning his sword into a ploughshare.
Leonard had stood all the time he was getting this news, but now that the hysterical ball of doubt and anxiety had left his throat, he flung his hat to the other end of the room, and took a chair. Douglas and Blunt did the same, and the whole four glided right away into a right jolly, right merry whole hour’s conversation, what the Scotch folks would call “a foursome crack.” The old lawyer’s clerk—and he was old, too—came on tiptoe to the door and listened, for he had not heard such laughing and joking and merriment for many and many a long year.
The wanderers rose at last to say good-bye for the present.
“Now don’t write and tell them we’ve come,” said Leonard. “We want to go and surprise them.”
“But, my dear young squire—”
“Bother the squire!” cried Leonard, laughing.