All trace of Lennard Melfort had been obliterated at Craigengowan, we have said. He was never mentioned there, and though his family tried to think of him as dead, they did not quite succeed; but the disappearance of his name from the Army List first excited a little speculation, but no inquiry, until a terrible event occurred.
The eldest son, the Hon. Cosmo, married the daughter of Lady Drumshoddy, thus securing her thousands, and did his best to console Lord and Lady Fettercairn for 'the disgrace' brought upon them by Lennard, and they regarded him quite as a model son.
He shone as Chairman at all kinds of county meetings; became M.P. for a cluster of northern burghs, and was a typical Scottish member, mightily interested when such grand Imperial matters as the gravelling of Park Lane, the ducks on the Serpentine, and the improvements at Hyde Park Corner were before the House, but was oblivious of all Scottish interests, or that such a place as Scotland existed. When she wanted—like other parts of the empire—but never got them—grants for necessary purposes, the Hon. Cosmo was mute as a fish, or if he spoke it was to record his vote against them.
Lennard saw in a chance newspaper, and with natural grief and dismay, that Cosmo had come to an untimely end when deer-stalking near Glentilt. He had wounded a large stag, the captain of its herd, and approached rashly or incautiously when the infuriated animal was at bay. It broke its bay, attacked him in turn, and ere the great shaggy hounds could tear it down, Cosmo was trampled under foot and gored to death by its horns.
As Lennard read, his sad mind went to the scene where that death must have happened, under mighty Ben-y-gloe, where the kestrel builds his nest and the great mountain eagle has his eyry, and the Tilt comes thundering down over its precipices of grey rock. Never again would his eyes rest on such glorious scenes as these.
Cosmo had left a little daughter, Finella, who took up her abode with her grandparents at Craigengowan, but no son, and Lennard knew that by this tragedy he was now the heir to the peerage, but he only gave a bitter sigh as he thought of Flora in her grave and made no sign.
'Poor Cosmo,' he muttered, and forgetting for a time much that had occurred, and how completely Cosmo had leagued with father and mother against him, his memory went back to the pleasant days of their happy boyhood, when they rode, fished, and shot together, shared the same bedroom in Craigengowan, and conned their tasks from the same books.
'Well, well,' he added, 'all that is over and done with long, long ago.'
He made no sign, we say, but let time pass by, not foreseeing the complications that were eventually to arise by his doing so.
Florian, born two years after the adoption of Shafto Gyle in his infancy, always regarded and looked up to the latter as a species of elder brother and undoubted senior.