The young man was divesting himself of his overcoat in the hall. He was a broad-shouldered muscular fellow, with very much the same stamp of features as his father, only that as he was clean-shaven, all but a moustache, the square outline of the jaw could be more distinctly seen. It was not a handsome face, but it was a strong one, and there was a gleam of humour in the brown eyes which redeemed it alike from heaviness and sternness.
The sister was a merry-looking girl of about twenty, with the family features, a little square in outline, but she had a tip-tilted nose, “a snub,” as the brothers called it, which gave her an expression of sauciness not at all contradicted by the dancing light in her eyes.
“Come in and warm yourself. The wind has been bitter all day. We must wait tea for the travellers. Any news in town?”
North walked into the long drawing-room, which occupied all the space through the house on one side of the hall. The house, though it now stood in a street, was detached from its neighbours, and showed in many of its arrangements that it had once been a gentleman’s country abode. It was old-fashioned and a little dark, but it wore a homelike aspect; and the room, which was panelled half-way up in sombre oak, was filled with the dancing light from a blazing fire of logs.
There were three persons in the room when the brother and sister entered. Mrs. Thomas Cossart (who was generally known in the place as Mrs. Tom, on account of the other Mrs. Cossart up at the big house) was knitting in her arm-chair with a book beside her. She was a matronly lady, with a pleasant face, which had been beautiful in youth, and was still quite comely. Her elder daughter Raby stood with a screen in her hand shielding her face from the blaze, and another son lounged upon the sofa, his hands clasped behind his head.
It was sometimes said of the Cossarts by their friends, that North and Ray were the useful ones in the family, and Raby and Cyril the ornamental. Raby was tall and slight, and took after her mother. Without being a beauty she was a decidedly good-looking girl, and had many admirers of both sexes. She dressed always a little better and more carefully than her sister; but she was not really either useless or idle. She had plenty of fun in her, and good nature too. But she had a greater love of admiration and amusement than that possessed by Ray.
Cyril presented a contrast to all the others of the family by being very fair where they were all inclined to be dark. As a child he had been singularly beautiful, with big blue eyes and a cloud of golden hair about his softly tinted face. His mother had been devoted to him from his babyhood, and even his father had found it difficult not to make something of an especial darling of him.
Now at three and twenty he was a very good-looking fellow, although some declared that he was girlish and effeminate in his looks. Certainly the golden hair and big blue eyes were rather suggestive of a fair girl; and this likeness was perhaps a little intensified from the fact that he was quite clean-shaven, and did not grow even a moustache, as Ray had often begged him to do. But he had inherited sufficient of the Cossart type of features to redeem the face from the charge of weakness. It was a refined and etherialised face, but something of the square outline of the jaw remained, although the lips did not close over each other in the firm way that was noticeable in North and Ray, but were a little inclined to fall apart, giving the face a dreamy and abstracted expression, which was much admired by many of the young ladies of Isingford, who were fond of making studies from Cyril Cossart’s profile, and turning them into pictures called “Sir Galahad,” or “The Knight without fear and without reproach.”
“Here they are!” cried Ray, who was still lingering about the half open door, “I hear wheels stopping. They have come! Mother, I shall go and open the door? It will look more friendly.”
She was across the hall before she had finished speaking, and had thrown the front door wide open before the maid could arrive upon the scene. North followed her and stood full in view. The next minute their father led in a girl dressed in deep mourning, whom he pushed towards his daughter saying—