Sallie smiled careless thanks for the courtesy and was still smiling when she emerged from the low doorway and stopped just beyond its threshold, so that Mr. Jobling and the others behind her had to wait patiently where they were while she gazed, enraptured and forgetful of all else, at the scene before her.
The sun was setting, blood-red, over the far sea-rim, and there was no least cloud in the radiant sky. The clear-cut mountains on either hand, the still loch and the broad Atlantic beyond it were all aglow with a marvellous, mystic light; the little cottages on the shore, three hundred sheer feet below her, were crimson instead of white; the very smoke which came from their chimneys seemed somehow ethereal and unreal.
She stood alone for a moment or two in a world transformed, till the quick, keen, exquisite pleasure of it brought a mist to her eyes that blurred it all, and, as she raised a hand to brush that away, she suddenly realized that she was not alone. There was a young man leaning over an embrasure at one corner of the battlements, who had been gazing, like her, at the sunset till she had come forth.
He was gazing at her now, and with even more admiration, however unconscious, than he had been bestowing on the beauties of nature inanimate; for the waning light had transfigured her sweet, sensitive features also, and into a semblance such as one might imagine an angel would wear.
Her eyes met his, and they two stood regarding each other so for the space of five fateful seconds. She had recognised him at once, but it was apparent that he did not yet know who she was.
He came forward then, limping a little, and bowed, bareheaded, to her; a sufficiently self-confident youth, straight and limber, good-looking enough, with smiling grey eyes and a mobile mouth, somewhat wistful at that moment in spite of his eyes.
"I'm sorry if I'm in the way," he said pleasantly. "Won't you come out and look round? The view all about is beyond any words of mine—and you're only seeing part of it there."
He hesitated slightly, regarding her with a very puzzled expression, before plunging further, and then, "I'm Justin Carthew," he continued, since she made no move at all, "although my lawyers would have me believe that I'm the ninth Earl of Jura now!" He laughed aloud, as if that idea were amusing. "In any case," he concluded naïvely, "the sunset doesn't belong to me."
She stepped out into the afterglow, still without a word, her mind full of vague misgivings. And, as Mr. Jobling followed her from the doorway, with Slyne and Captain Dove at his heels, and Mrs. M'Kissock, nervously fumbling with her chatelaine, last of all, Justin Carthew drew back a couple of paces.
"Your lawyers have misinformed you, Mr. Carthew," said Mr. Jobling in his most dogmatic manner. "You are no more the ninth Earl of Jura than I am, because—Let me introduce you—more formally!—to Lady Josceline Justice, the late earl's daughter, on whose property you are trespassing here."