'The world changes, and has changed in many things, Captain Dalton,' said he; 'but true to his old instincts man will always be a huntsman and a soldier.'
'But to uncart a tame deer, or let a hare out of a bag, and then pursue it with horse and dog as if one's life depended upon the recapture, scarcely seems a sane proceeding,' said Lord Cadbury, who still felt the effects of his 'spill' in the field, 'and all unsuited to this age of refinement.'
'I believe only in the refinement that is produced by the education of generations,' said Sir Ranald, a little irrelevantly, as he tugged his white moustache and felt himself unable to repress a covert sneer at the very man for whom he had destined Alison, with whom the peer was too much occupied to hear what was said.
With all her regard and esteem for old Archie Auchindoir, Alison was rather bored by the bewilderment of Goring and others, on whom he was in attendance, at his quaintness, oddity, and unintelligible dialect; and sooth to say, all undeterred by rank and wealth, he was very inattentive and curt to Lord Cadbury, of whose views he was no more ignorant than most servants usually are of their superior's affairs.
Thus many a grimace stole over his wrinkled and saturnine visage as he watched the pair, and muttered, as he carved game at the sideboard—
'It is a braw thing to be lo'ed, nae doubt, but wha wad mool wi' an auld moudiewart like that? No our Miss Alison, certes.'
On the strength of his wealth and rank, of many a pretty present forced upon her unwillingly, yet with her father's consent, and curiously enough upon his great seniority to her in years, which enabled him 'to do the paternal,' as Mrs. Trelawney once said, Lord Cadbury assumed a kind of right of proprietary in Alison Cheyne that was very galling to the latter before her guests, and under the sense of which Bevil Goring chafed in secret as he drank his wine in silence and gnawed his moustache in sheer anger, for Alison was fast becoming to him more than he might ever dare acknowledge to herself.
'You must have married when very young, Mrs. Trelawney,' said Dalton, who was plying her daughter with grapes and crystallised fruits.
'Yes—I was just seventeen.'
'It is so romantic to marry young.'