'Any chance of lunch, do you think?'
'Lunch?'
'Yes. When a fellow has travelled nearly forty miles in a morning, and crossed the Firth, he wants something to pick him up.'
'Lunch is past already,' said Mrs. Lindsay stiffly; 'but ring the bell, please.'
She made no attempt with effusive hospitality to rise from her seat. That would have implied kindness, attention, and, more than all, it would have involved exertion; and she was contriving now to be one of those imperturbable creatures who never allow themselves to be influenced or bored; and when Roland withdrew to the familiar dining-room to partake of the meal, and where he was welcomed by jolly old Simon Funnell, his father's rubicund butler, with shining face and outstretched hands, she did not accompany him; nor did he observe, when he left her, how her pale face expressed by turns dread, defiance, hatred, and more!
One would have supposed that the mere difference of sex might have affected her, and made her disposed to view favourably, and to greet pleasantly at least, the only son of the man to whose folly she owed so much—a handsome young fellow, whose face made even those of old women brighten. But it was not so; and thus bitterly did Roland Lindsay feel that his home-coming, with all its sense of irritation and humiliation, was such that, but for Maude and those at Merlwood, he would have regretted that he did not perish after Kashgate, when he lay helpless in the desert, with the foul Egyptian vultures hovering over him.
CHAPTER XII.
MAUDE.
Lunch ended, Roland was lingering rather gloomily over a glass of his father's old favourite Amontillado, which Simon Funnell had disinterred from the cobwebby bins of the cellar for his special delectation, when an exclamation made him start; a pair of soft arms were thrown around his neck, and a bright, fair face was pressed against his cheek.
'Maude!'