“Now,” said Ralph, “I’m just nineteen. I’ve only two years more of what I call roving life, and if I don’t ride across some continent before I’m twenty-one, or embark at one end of some unknown river and come out into the sea at the other, I’ll never have a chance again.”
“Why, how is that?” said McBain.
“Well,” replied Ralph, “Sir Walter Leigh, my father, told me straight that we were as poor as Church mice, and that in order to retrieve our fortunes, as soon as I came of age I must marry my grandmother.”
“Marry your grandmother!” exclaimed McBain, half rising in his chair.
“Well, my cousin, then,” said Ralph, smiling; “she is five-and-forty, so it is all the same. But she has oceans of money, and my old father, bless him! is very, very good and kind. He doesn’t limit me in money now; though, of course, I don’t take advantage of all his generosity. ‘Go and travel, my boy,’ he said, ‘and enjoy yourself till you come of age. Just see all you can and thus have your fling. I know I can trust you.’”
“Have your fling?” cried Rory; “troth now that is exactly what my Irish tenants told me to do. ‘The sorra a morsel av rint have we got to give you,’ says they, ‘so go and have your fling, but ’deed and indeed, if we see you here again until times are mended, we’ll shoot ye as dead as a Ballyshannon rabbit.’”
“Well, young gentlemen,” said McBain, after a pause in the conversation, during which nothing was heard except the crackling of the blazing logs and the mournful moaning of the wind without, “you want to do something quite new. Well, I’ve got an idea.”
“Oh, do tell us what it is?” cried Ralph and Rory, both in one breath.
“No, no; not to-night,” said McBain, laughing; “besides, it wants working out a bit, so I’m off to bed to dream about it. Good night.”
“Depend upon it,” said Allan McGregor, as he parted with his friends at their chamber door, “that whatever it is, McBain’s idea is a good one, and he’ll tell us all about it to-morrow. You’ll see.”