'Because I have the subject at heart.'
They were posed like a couple of Du Maurier's fashionable girls, and were leisurely sipping afternoon tea at a pretty Chippendale table from an exquisite Wedgwood service, and, for freedom to gossip, had dispensed with all attendance.
Both the cousins were handsome girls, whose bearded, belted, and corsletted ancestors—portraits of whom hung on the walls, and who had often
'Carved at the meal with gloves of steel,'
in that same Castle of Dundargue—would have regarded such a repast and such a beverage as 'afternoon tea' with no small wonder, and, perhaps, disgust.
Eveline Graham was very softly featured and slender in figure; but Olive Raymond, who was the taller of the two, was more fully developed, yet looked slim as a Greek goddess in a dress of deep blue that became her pure complexion and rich brown hair, with only a tiny bouquet of white flowers in the brooch at her bosom, and a multitude of silver bangles—emblems of conquest, perhaps—like silver fetters, on her slender and snowy wrists. She was fair and colourless, with dark grey violet eyes that looked black under their jetty fringes at night.
Eveline was more dazzlingly fair, but more petite, with soft, hazel eyes, and bright, brown hair that was shot with gold. She had exquisite hands and feet, and though petite, as we say, and slender, she had a peculiar grace and dignity of manner that only required a brocade-dress, ruff, and long stomacher to make her like one of her stately 'forbears,' whose portraits by Jameson were in the room in which she sat—a modern portion of the grim old Castle of Dundargue, the aspect and construction of which edifice were very different from those of the additions that had been made to it in later times.
And as the girls sit there, in the tempered light of the afternoon sun streaming through the French windows that open to a stately balustraded terrace, and sip their tea leisurely, their conversation will throw some light upon the past, and perhaps the future, of certain of our dramatis personæ.
'When Allan returns—'began Eveline.
'Oh, don't talk to me again of Allan!' interrupted Olive Raymond, with a petulant toss of her pretty head, 'or I will begin to tease you about Stratherroch.'