Yet it was an adamantean colonel that remarked:
"My dear, perhaps it is just as fortunate as not that you have quitted Matocton. For I have heard tales of you, Miss Ramsay. Oh, no! I honestly do not believe that you would have taken kindlily to any young person—not even in the guise of a great-great-grand-daughter,—to whom you cannot hold a candle, madam. A fico for you, madam," said the most undutiful of great-great-grandsons.
Let us leave him to his roseate meditations. Questionless, in the woman he loved there was much of his own invention: but the circumstance is not unhackneyed; and Colonel Musgrave was in a decorous fashion the happiest of living persons.
Meanwhile Joe Parkinson, a young man much enamored, who fought the world by ordinary, like Hal o' the Wynd "for his own hand," was seeing Patricia every day.
V
Joe Parkinson—tall and broad-shouldered, tanned, resolute, chary of speech, decisive in gesture, having close-cropped yellow hair and frank, keen eyes like amethysts,—was the one alien present when Colonel Musgrave came again into Roger Stapylton's fine and choicely-furnished mansion.
This was on the evening Roger Stapylton gave the long-anticipated dinner at which he was to announce his daughter's engagement. As much indeed was suspected by most of his dinner-company, so carefully selected from the aristocracy of Lichfield; and the heart of the former overseer, as these handsome, courtly and sweet voiced people settled according to their rank about his sumptuous table, was aglow with pride.
Then Rudolph Musgrave turned to his companion and said softly: "My dear, you are like a wraith. What is it?"
"I have a headache," said Patricia. "It is nothing."
"You reassure me," the colonel gaily declared, "for I had feared it was a heartache—"