Full of Dulcie and her apparently cruel desertion of him, which he considered due to calm consideration of his change of fortune—or rather total want of it—Florian felt numbly indifferent to the matter Shafto had in hand and all about himself.
While very nearly moved to girlish tears at parting from one with whom he had lived since infancy—with whom he had shared the same sleeping-room, shared in the same sports and studies—with whom he had read the same books to some extent, and had ever viewed as a brother—Florian was rather surprised, even shocked, by the impatience of that kinsman, the only one he had in all the wide world, to part from him and begone, and to see he was calm and hard as flint or steel.
'Different natures have different ways of showing grief, I suppose,' thought the simple Florian; 'or can it be that he still has a grudge at me because of the false but winsome Dulcie? If affection for me is hidden in his heart, it is hidden most skilfully.' No letter ever came from Craigengowan. The pride of Florian was justly roused, and he resolved that he would not take the initiative, and attempt to open a correspondence with one who seemed to ignore him, and whose manner at departing he seemed to see more clearly and vividly now.
The fact soon became grimly apparent. He could not remain idling in such a fashionable hotel as the Duke of Rothesay, so he settled his bill there, and took his portmanteau in his hand, and issued into the streets—into the world, in fact.
CHAPTER XI.
SHAFTO IN CLOVER.
About six months had elapsed since Shafto and Florian parted, as we have described, at Edinburgh.
It was June now. The luxurious woods around Craigengowan were in all their leafy beauty, and under their shadows the dun deer panted in the heat as they made their lair among the feathery braken; the emerald green lawn was mowed and rolled till it was smooth as a billiard-table and soft as three-pile velvet.
The air was laden with the wafted fragrance of roses and innumerable other flowers; and the picturesque old house, with its multitude of conical turrets furnished with glittering vanes, its crow-stepped gables and massive chimneys, stood boldly up against the deep blue sky of summer; and how sweetly peaceful looked the pretty village, seen in middle distance, through a foliated vista in the woodlands, with the white smoke ascending from its humble hearths, the only thing that seemed to be stirring there; and how beautiful were the colours some of its thatched roofs presented—greenest moss, brown lichen, and stonecrop, now all a blaze of gold, while the murmur of a rivulet (a tributary of the Esk), that gurgled under its tiny arch, 'the auld brig-stane' of Lennard's boyhood, would be heard at times, amid the pleasant voices of some merrymakers on the lawn, amid the glorious shrubberies, and belts of flowers below the stately terrace, that had long since replaced the moat that encircled the old fortified mansion, from whence its last Jacobite lord had ridden forth to fight and die for James VIII., on the field of Sheriffmuir—King of Scotland, England, France, and Ireland, as the unflinching Jacobites had it.
A gay and picturesquely dressed lawn-tennis party was busy tossing the balls from side to side among several courts; but apart from all, and almost conspicuously so—a young fellow, in a handsome light tennis suit of coloured flannels, and a beautiful girl were carrying on a very palpable flirtation.