“Certainly you may do so—it is just what I have been hoping for,” replied Sir Adam, and the hands of the pretty clock on Hebe’s mantelpiece had very nearly made their accustomed journey of a full hour before it suddenly struck Sir Adam that he was scarcely behaving with courtesy to his hosts in spending so much of the evening away from the rest of the party.
Just then Norman Milward put his head in at the door.
“I’m most sorry to interrupt you,” he said. “But Lady Marth thinks that perhaps—”
“Of course,” said Sir Adam, rising as he spoke; “I had no business to stay so long.—Then you’ll expect us to-morrow afternoon, my dear child? I will explain it to Lady Marth.—You’ll stay up here, I suppose, Milward?”
“Yes,” the young man replied; “I’ve scarcely seen her yet. It seems all too good to be true.”
Sir Adam glanced back at them as he left the room, standing together on the hearthrug, the firelight dancing on the two bright heads, on the two young faces so very full of happy gratitude.
“I scarcely feel like a childless old fogy, after all,” he thought, as he made his way down-stairs. “It seems to me I have a good many children. That little Stasy now—Blanche is charming, but Stasy is perfectly irresistible.”
About four o’clock the next afternoon the Alderwood brougham might have been seen on the road from Blissmore to East Moddersham. There were two people inside it—Blanche Derwent and Sir Adam. It was a cold day, for the autumn was now advancing rapidly.
“Dear me,” said Blanche, with a slight shiver, as she glanced out of the window at her side, “this road is beginning to look quite wintry. It is just about a year since mamma and Stasy and I drove along here for the first time, the day we came down to look at Pinnerton Lodge—only a year!”
Sir Adam stooped and drew the fur rug a little more closely round her.