'But will they come, mamma?' said Blanche. 'You know we have never called on them.'
'That is a matter easily remedied—deliver your invitations in person,' said old Lord Dunkeld.
'And if we invite them here, are we also to invite the elder girl's shadow?' asked Blanche.
'Her shadow!' exclaimed Lady Dunkeld. Who do you mean?'
'That young man—I do not rightly know his name—to whom she is, Rosette tells me, engaged.'
'Of course not; where would your list end if we went on thus?'
Blanche either meant Ellinor's lover, or made a mistake; but somehow both Colville and Sir Redmond Sleath noted her words.
After a time it was discovered that 'the young man' referred to was Dr. Wodrow's only son, so his name was included in the list.
'How many such acquaintances as these people are made in a year and then dropped,' observed Blanche, unaware that Captain Colville coloured with something of pain and even annoyance at her remark.
To all this sort of thing Sir Redmond Sleath listened with attention. We need not conceal the fact or circumstance that this enterprising baronet had marked out the soft, dreamy, artistic, and gentle Ellinor for a kind of affaire du cœur peculiarly his own. Mary Wellwood, from her natural strength of character, he knew to be beyond the range of his nefarious views or schemes; and eventually, the warmth of his attentions to Ellinor were only curbed in public or veiled by a wholesome fear of his new acquaintance, Captain Colville, who, he thought, was 'idiotically smitten' by a fancy for or interest in Mary, for a time, of course, he supposed, 'as these things never lasted;' and he hoped, when the Guardsman went back to town and was fully under the influence of Blanche and her mother, to return to the vicinity of Birkwoodbrae on any pretence, and then have the field to himself.