'You have not seen her since your return,' said Holcroft to Allan Graham.
'No; but I shall very soon now.'
'She is a very handsome girl; what the deuce have the men been about to leave her all this time Miss Raymond?'
'All this time? Why, she has not yet seen her twentieth year,' exclaimed Allan, with some annoyance, as he thought of the photo.
'Her costumes are chic,' continued Holcroft, 'chic to a degree! How I admired her portrait in the Grosvenor Gallery; and wise was the artist to label it "Fair to See."'
Allan glanced at his father, and his face clouded to hear all this—praise though it was—in the mouth of Hawke Holcroft.
'You have an appreciation of beauty, apparently,' said young Cameron.
'Who has not? Thus, as Disraeli says, "the action of lovely woman on our destiny is increasing," and, as Miss Raymond——'
'I am Miss Raymond's uncle and guardian,' said Lord Aberfeldie, rather stiffly, and to Mr. Holcroft, as it seemed, a little irrelevantly, though cutting short whatever he meant to say; for the peer winced at the way in which his guest referred to his niece in the hearing of gillies and gamekeepers, and, more than all, in the presence of Allan, whose dark eyes wore rather a lowering expression; but, as all had hearty appetites after their recent exercise and long exposure in the keen, bracing mountain air of an autumn day, they were inclined to use their knives and forks rather than their tongues, and the subject, however pleasing to Mr. Holcroft, was dropped.
The latter was not a pleasing type of Englishman, though his air and bearing were thoroughly those of a gentleman. He had a good square figure, but his legs were somewhat of the spindle order, as his knickerbocker suit revealed. He was flaxen-haired, fair-skinned, and somewhat freckled, with a tawny moustache and pale grey eyes; and strange it was that these, though weak-looking, cunning, and shifty, would assume at times, but covertly, a defiant, even ferocious expression, if evil passions excited him.