“Douglas! Douglas!” and the young man turned back, without another word, springing away, over the graveled walks. Nadine’s face grew ashen white, as the presage of coming disaster chilled her heart.
Without a word, Justine Delande led the startled girl into the house. “You are to see your uncle at once! After our breakfast! And I will be with you.” faltered Justine, with an averted face.
The orphaned girl was now dimly conscious of some impending blow. She had been frightened at the solemnity of Douglas Fraser’s hasty farewell, and, while Justine Delande affected to touch the breakfast spread in their rooms by the Swiss lady’s maid, now gloomy in an attack of heimweh, Nadine saw a four-wheeler rattle away over the lawn, while old Andrew Fraser grimly watched it until the gates clanged behind the departing Anglo-Indian. Over the low wall, on the road, Douglas Fraser caught a last glimpse of the graceful girl standing there. He sadly waved an adieu, and Nadine Johnstone was left with but one friend in the world, save the silent Swiss governess. Though the two women were sumptuously lodged “in fair upper chambers,” opening east and south, with their maid near at hand, the gloomy chill of the silent household had already penetrated the lonely girl’s heart. No single sign of the warmer amenities. Only books, books, dusty books, by the thousand, piled helter-skelter in every available nook and cranny.
The servants were slouching and sullen, and they moved about their duties with gloomy brows. Even the gardener and his two stout boys struck sadly away with mattock and spade as if digging graves. No chirp of bird, no baying of a friendly dog, no burst of childish merriment broke the droning silence. And this was the home to which a father had doomed his only child.
When the frightened maid tapped at the door to summon her mistress, her feeble rapping sounded like a hammer falling sadly on the hollow coffin lid. The girl stammered, “The master would like to see you both in the library.” And with a sinking heart Nadine Fraser Johnstone descended the stair.
She had only cast a frightened glimpse at the yellowed, bony face, the cavernous eye sockets, the bushy eyebrows, beneath which a cold intellectual gleam still feebly flickered. Andrew Fraser had bent his tall form over her, and peering down at her had whispered after their few words of greeting:
“Did ye gain aught in knowledge of Thibet in your Indian life? My life work lies there, and Hugh has sorely disappointed me. He was to send me books and maps and papers for my ‘History of Thibet and the Wanderings of the Ten Tribes.’” With a confused negation the girl had fled away to the cheerless shelter of the great rooms whose drab and gray arrangements bespoke the Reformatory or a Refuge for the Friendless.
And the stern old scholar waited for the fluttering bird whom adverse Fate had driven into his dismal lair with all the pompous severity of a guardian and trustee.
Seated at a long desk littered with a multitude of papers, Professor Andrew Fraser coldly bowed the two women to convenient seats. The parvenu banker who had fled away after a bankruptcy due to the erection and embellishment of “The Folly,” had approved a semi-medieval plan of construction which suggested a Norman stronghold or a Corsican mansion arranged for a stubborn defense. Books, globes, maps, and papers littered the floors, and were piled nearby in convenient heaps with tell-tale flying signals of copious note taking. It was a bristling Redoubt of Learning.
But on this sunny morning the retired Professor of Edinburg University held sundry letters, dispatches, and legal papers clutched in his claw-like hands. His eye rested upon Justine Delande, in a semi-hostile glare, as he slowly said: