'Why?'
'Because she was mad or intoxicated—most insolent, at all events,' replied Shafto, with a choking sensation in his throat.
'To you?'
'Yes—to me.'
'Well,' resumed Lord Fettercairn, who evidently seemed very much perturbed, 'she has been with Mr. Kippilaw, as I tell you, and has made some strange revelations requiring immediate and close investigation.'
'May I know what they are?' asked Shafto with a sinking heart, that only rose when spite and hate and fury gathered in it.
'No—you may not, yet,' replied Lord Fettercairn, as he folded up the letter and abruptly left the table; and that same forenoon his lordship took an early train for Edinburgh.
Shafto heard of this with growing alarm, which all the brandy and soda of which he partook freely in the smoking-room, and more than one huge cabana, could not soothe. Though fearing the worst, through Madelon Galbraith, he thought that perhaps in the meantime Kippilaw's business referred to his gambling debts, his bills and promissory notes, and too probably to his 'row with that cad, Garallan,' as he mentally termed the affair of the loaded die.
He rambled long alone in the same stately avenue down which Lennard Melfort had passed so many years before, when, with a gallant heart full of anger, wounded pride, and undeserved sorrow, he turned his back for ever on lordly Craigengowan.
There he loitered, full of anxious and most unenviable thoughts, sulkily dragging down his fair moustache; and it has been remarked by physiognomists that good-natured men always twirl their moustaches upwards, whereas a morose or suspicious man does just the reverse.