She smoothed back her thick dark hair with her pretty and tremulous hands, and then, placing them on my temples, surveyed me again and again, with eyes full of pity and delight, while half-kneeling beside me on the low fauteuil on which I lay.
"Cora!"
"Newton!"
She was too full of pure joy to speak; she could only throw her arms round my neck and whisper, with her rosy lip close to my ear—
"Newton—Newton—my poor Newton! my own love at last—and—and—here comes papa."
As if to relieve me from a situation that was as embarrassing as it was pleasing, the affectionate old gentleman hurried forward to meet me. He had been less agile than his daughter in springing upstairs, and threading the mysterious corridors of an English hotel. He took me in his sturdy arms. His eyes were sparkling with pleasure; his ruddy cheeks were now rendered redder than ever by the frosty wind; his white locks glittered in the light; and his handsome old face was beaming with pleasure, as it always did when he saw me. Warmly he shook my hands again and again. He surveyed my hollow cheeks with commiseration, as Cora now did with tears; and then, with prodigious bustle, he proceeded to divest himself of numerous overcoats and wrappers, until he appeared at last in his black cut-away, with white corded breeches and top-boots, as of old the beau idéal of the master of the Fifeshire hounds.
"So we have found you at last, my dear boy—fairly run you to earth, eh? You must come home with us now——"
"To-night, papa?"
"Not exactly to-night, Cora; but as soon as he is fit for travelling. And a rare cooper of old port Davie Binns shall set abroach when again Newton is beneath the roof of the house in which his mother was born, and where she died, too, poor girl!"
My mother was more than forty when she died; but the old baronet only remembered his favourite sister as "the girl," of whose beauty he was always so proud.