“Well, no!” she replied. “I can’t say that you painted it for us in very attractive colours; in fact, you have not praised it up at all.”
“I could scarcely have done so,” he said; “I know it so little. But hearing what you, or rather what your mother wanted—bracing northern air, with a touch of the sea, and to be left at peace, it would have been rather dog-in-the-manger of me not to suggest it.”
“Oh! it was very kind of you to think of us,” she replied, more cordially than she had yet spoken. “You must come down when we are there and learn to know your own home, or rather the home of your forefathers, for Horace tells me it was the cradle of your race. It is odd,” she went on, reflectively, “that you should never have cared to know it better.”
Something in her words or tone slightly jarred on the owner of Craig-Morion.
He pushed his chair back a little, and hesitated in his reply.
“A great many things seem odd to outsiders,” he said, dryly.
Madeleine smiled. Somehow, though she scarcely could have said why, for she had no real antipathy to her sister-in-law’s brother, she and Ryder Morion never “got on,” though underneath this surface antagonism each had for the other a solid foundation of respect and even liking.
“Yes,” she replied coolly, “it is not always the case that they see ‘the most of the game.’ I am afraid I am a born gossip,” she added, with a little laugh. “I like to know the ins and outs of my friends’ affairs. And oh, by-the-by, à propos of Craig-Morion, you have relations there of your own name, I hear! Do tell me something about them.”
“You could not apply in a worse quarter,” he said. “I know literally nothing of them, except that the father is a peculiar, and, as far as any personal experience of him goes, a very disagreeable man. There was an old—complication. He believes his grandfather should have inherited the place, instead of my people, though really, as it all happened ages before I was born, I don’t see why he visits it on me.”
“And does he?” inquired Madeleine.