“I more than once had my own doubts about that,” said the alcohol expert with a knowing wink. “There was something about him—— Ah, well, he was not exactly my own idea of a lord.”
“YOUR idea?” scoffed his oldest and best of friends. “What do YOU know of lords, I'd like to know?”
“Well, well,” answered the sage peaceably, “maybe we've neither of us had much opportunity of judging of the nobility. It's just more bad luck than anything else that you should have gone to the expense of setting up in style in a lord's castle and then having this downcome. If I'd had similar ambeetions it might have been me.”
This soft answer was so far from turning away wrath, that Mrs. Rentoul again felt compelled to stem the tide of her host's eloquence.
“Oh, hush!” she exclaimed; “I'd have fancied you'd be having no thoughts beyond your daughter's affliction.”
“My Eva! my poor Eva! Where is the suffering child?” cried Mrs. Gallosh. “Duncan, what'll she be doing?”
“Making a to-do like the rest of the women-folk,” replied her husband, with rather less sympathy than the occasion seemed to demand.
In point of fact Eva had disappeared from the company immediately after hearing the contents of Mr. Maddison's letter, and whatever she had been doing, it had not been weeping alone, for at that moment she ran into the room, her face agitated, but rather, it seemed, with excitement than grief.
“Papa, lend me five pounds,” she panted.
“Lend you—five pounds! And what for, I'd like to know?”