‘It is I. I have been waiting here expecting you might return earlier. You are out late to-night.’
‘The mare put her foot in a hole, stupid brute! A fine roll she gave me, too.’
He made an exclamation, and, catching sight of some mud on her sleeve, led her to the light. She went quietly and stood while he looked at her.
‘Gad, my lady! you have been down indeed! You are none the worse, I trust?’
‘No, no; but I will send for a dish of tea, and drink it by the fire. It is cold outside.’
‘But you are wet, my dear lady.’
‘What does that matter? I shall take no harm. Ring the bell, Fullarton—the rope is at your hand.’
Robert Fullarton did as he was desired, and stood looking at the ragged grass and the boles of the trees. His figure and the rather blunt outline of his features showed dark against the pane. At sixty he was as upright as when he and Lady Eliza had been young together, and he the first of the county gentlemen in polite pursuits. At a time when it was hardly possible to be anything else, he had never been provincial, for though he was, before anything, a sportsman, he had been one of the very few of his day capable of combining sport with wider interests.
The friendship between his own family and that of Morphie House had gone far back into the preceding century, long before Mr. Lamont, second son of an impoverished earl, had inherited the property through his mother, and settled down upon it with Lady Eliza, his unmarried sister. At his death she had stepped into his place, still unmarried, a blunt, prejudiced woman, understood by few, and, oddly enough, liked by many. Morphie was hers for life and was to pass, at her death, to a distant relation of her mother’s family. She was well off, and, being the only occupant of a large house, with few personal wants and but one expensive taste, she had become as autocratic as a full purse and a life outside the struggles and knocks of the world will make anyone who is in possession of both.
The expensive taste was her stable; for, from the hour that she had been lifted as a little child upon the back of her father’s horse, she had wavered only once in her decision that horses and all pertaining to them presented by far the most attractive possibilities in life. Her hour of wavering had come later.