A chance word, spoken at hazard, sometimes bears fruit. Adela, a faint light rising in her eyes as she heard this, lifted her voice eagerly. "Mother, let me go; send me there as soon as you please," she said. "It will at least be better for me there than here, for I shall be out of the world."
"Out of the world!" snapped Lady Acorn. "You can't be much more out of it than you are down here in Oxfordshire."
"Yes, I can. The neighbours, those who are at their places, come in to see us, and papa sometimes brings people home from town. Let me go to Harriet."
It was speedily decided. Lady Acorn, severe though she was with Adela, had her welfare at heart, and she thought a thorough change might be beneficial to her. An old friend, who chanced to be going abroad, took charge of Lady Adela to Geneva: Sir Sandy MacIvor and his wife met her there, and took her back with them to the château.
That was in October. Adela found the château as isolated as she could well desire, and therefore she was pleased with it; and she told Sir Sandy and Harriet she was glad to have come.
They had never thought of staying in this château for the winter; they meant to go to Rome early in December. But as that month approached, Adela evinced a great dislike to move. She would not go to Rome to encounter the English there, she told them; she would stay where she was. It a little perplexed the MacIvors; Adela had now grown so weak and low-spirited that they did not like to cross her or to insist upon it that she must go; neither did they care to give her up as their inmate, for her money was of consequence to them.
"What if we make up our minds to stay here for the winter, Harriet?" at length said Sir Sandy, who was as easy-tempered, genial-hearted a little laird as could be met with in or out of Scotland: though he stood only five feet high in his shoes, and nothing could be seen of his face except his small retroussé nose standing out of the mass of bright yellow hair which adorned it.
"It will be so cold," grumbled Harriet. "Think of all these draughts."
"They won't hurt," said the laird, who was bred to such things, his paternal stronghold in the Highlands not being altogether air-tight. "I'll nail some list over the cracks, and we'll lay in a good stock of wood and keep up grand fires. I think we might be comfortable, Harriet. It must be as you decide, of course, dear; but Adela can't be left here alone, and if we say she must go with us to Rome, she may fret herself into a fever."
"She is doing that as it is," returned Harriet. "We might stay here, of course—and we should get the place for an old song during the cold months. Perhaps we had better do so. Yet I should like to have been in Rome for the Christmas festivities, and for the carnival later."