'Did you ever observe his mode of gesticulating with them?'
'No.'
'Well, I have, and to me it seemed to indicate foreign blood and player-like proclivities.'
Hew's hands were neither white nor shapely, and certainly bore no indication of that refinement of race on which his listener set such store.
'We have not heard the last of this fellow,' he resumed, after a pause.
'The last! What do you mean?'
'His interference in our family affairs. A card-playing fortune-hunter, as I denounced him to be before; he was here no longer ago than yesterday afternoon, pursuing his designs upon our soft-hearted, and I must say, remarkably soft-headed, Mary! I felt inclined to chuck him through the window. Must not this matter be stopped, sir, and with the strong hand?'
'Stopped; I should think so. Should he attempt to cross me, he'd better touch the fuse of a live shell!' replied the old man sharply, while memory went back to the bitter times when his young Piers, so loved, petted, and prized, forgot the high traditions of his family, and daringly linked his fate with a humble girl, whom the proud baronet declined to receive or recognise, most unwisely, as he thought at times now.
'We are an old family, Hew,' he resumed, after a pause; 'and you will be the inheritor of my title in an untarnished condition; but you must not rest upon it alone, and, with Mary's money added to what I have to leave you—Eaglescraig, wood and wold, tower and manor-place—great things may be achieved. You will cherish Mary when I am gone, even as I have cherished her; for I have nothing else now,' he added, as he thought of his dead son and the never-to-be-forgotten night of the dread and shadowy vision.
'I cannot persuade her to enter even into a preliminary and formal engagement with me,' said Hew, after another pause.