'Another glass of Moët, and then we shall join the ladies.'
'Life is a hard game with some of us now,' said Holcroft, as he pocketed his cheque. 'As some one has written, "Men cannot go freebooting or looting now, except in business; and it is quite a question whether a modern promoter is not quite as respectable a member of society as a riever used to be, in the old days when right was might."
'And Dundargue was built,' added Lord Aberfeldie, laughing.
'I did not say so.'
'Ah, but you thought it.'
And now they rose from the table.
Holcroft was not the better, but rather the worse for his potations. He had eaten little and drunk much. Thus he looked very pale—almost ghastly; and a strange fixed grimness replaced occasionally the usual restlessness of his shifty pale eyes and freckled face.
Curiously enough he had hovering in his mind a kind of vengeance just then at Olive. But for her sudden, and, as he thought, capricious preference for her cousin, and throwing him so completely over, the deed he had committed would never have been done.
Eveline had withdrawn to her room, whither her mother had followed her, bent on worry and expostulation no doubt; Lord Aberfeldie was required by his steward, and Holcroft found Olive seated alone in a bay window of the drawing-room, watching the last rays of the sun fading out behind the Sidlaw Hills.
'Another hour—even less, Miss Raymond—and my place here will be vacant,' said he, in a low and unnatural voice, while attempting to hang over her chair in his old fashion.