'Oh, papa, I have never had so delightful a day with the hounds as this!'
The master of a broken fortune and impoverished household, Sir Ranald Cheyne, baronet of Essilmont and that ilk, as he duly figured in that year's volume of Burke and Debrett, with a pedigree going far beyond the first baronet of his house, who had been patented in 1625, and duly infeft at the Castle-gate of Edinburgh with a vast patrimony in Nova Scotia, and 'power of pit and gallows' over his vassals there, was a proud and querulous man, stately in manner and somewhat cold and selfish to all men, save his daughter Alison, who was the apple of his eye, the pride of his old heart, on whose beauty, as the means of winning another fortune, all his hopes in life were based, and with whom he was now living in semi-obscurity at Chilcote, a small, venerable, and secluded mansion in Hampshire.
Sir Ranald had a pale and worn face that in youth had been eminently handsome; his silver hair, or rather what remained of it, was brushed back behind his wax-like ears, and a smile of great tenderness for his daughter, the last of his old, old race and the hope of his age, lighted up his aristocratic features.
A gold-rimmed pince-nez was balanced on the thin ridge of his rather aquiline nose, and though his bright blue eyes were smiling, as we say, their normal expression may be described as usually one of 'worry.'
His voice was in unison with his face—it was worn too, if we may use the expression, yet soft and not unmusical.
'You had an escort to the gate, I saw?' said he, interrogatively. 'Lord Cadbury, of course; why did he not come in?'
'Oh, no; I missed him in the field somewhere.'
'And your escort?'
'Was Captain Goring—you know him—from Aldershot,' she replied, a little nervously.
'Again?' said Sir Ranald, with just the slightest shade of displeasure flitting over his face. 'You were safely driven to the meet by Mrs. Trelawney?'