“What like a place is it?” asked McLeod, becoming suddenly much more interested.
“Oh! one place mos bootiful,” replied Le Rue, with enthusiasm; “de house is superb, de grounds splendeed, et le prospect magnifique, wid plenty of duck—perhaps sometimes goose, vild vons—in von lac near cliff immense.”
At the mention of the lake and the cliff McLeod’s brow darkened, and he glanced at Flora, who met his glance with a look of surprise.
“Did you happen to hear the name of the place?” asked McLeod.
“Oui, it vas, I tink, Lac Do, or Doo—someting like so.”
“The scoundrel!” muttered McLeod between his teeth, while a gleam of wrath shot from his eyes.
Le Rue looked at him with some surprise, being uncertain as to the person referred to by this pithy remark, and Flora glanced at him with a look of anxiety.
After a brief silence he said to Flora in a low tone, as though he were expressing the continuation of his thoughts, “To think that the fellow should thus abuse my hospitality by inducing me to speak of our fallen fortunes, and of our being obliged to part with the old home we had loved so well, and never to utter a word about his having bought the place.”
“Perhaps,” suggested Flora, “you had not mentioned the name of the place, and so it might not have occurred to him that—”
“Oh yes, I did,” interrupted her father, with increasing anger, as his memory recalled the converse with Redding on the preceding night, “I remember it well, for he asked the name, and I told it him. It’s not that I care a straw whether the old place was bought by Tom, Dick, or Harry, but I can’t stand his having concealed the fact from me after so much, I may say, confidential conversation about it and our affairs generally. When I meet him again the young coxcomb shall have a piece of my mind.”