Sir Patrick took his niece’s hand.
“Stop a minute, Blanche. About Miss Silvester? Have you heard from her to-day?”
“No. I am more unhappy about her than words can say.”
“Suppose somebody went to Craig Fernie and tried to find out the cause of Miss Silvester’s silence? Would you believe that somebody sympathized with you then?”
Blanche’s face flushed brightly with pleasure and surprise. She raised Sir Patrick’s hand gratefully to her lips.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “You don’t mean that you would do that?”
“I am certainly the last person who ought to do it—seeing that you went to the inn in flat rebellion against my orders, and that I only forgave you, on your own promise of amendment, the other day. It is a miserably weak proceeding on the part of ‘the head of the family’ to be turning his back on his own principles, because his niece happens to be anxious and unhappy. Still (if you could lend me your little carriage), I might take a surly drive toward Craig Fernie, all by myself, and I might stumble against Miss Silvester—in case you have any thing to say.”
“Any thing to say?” repeated Blanche. She put her arm round her uncle’s neck, and whispered in his ear one of the most interminable messages that ever was sent from one human being to another. Sir Patrick listened, with a growing interest in the inquiry on which he was secretly bent. “The woman must have some noble qualities,” he thought, “who can inspire such devotion as this.”
While Blanche was whispering to her uncle, a second private conference—of the purely domestic sort—was taking place between Lady Lundie and the butler, in the hall outside the library door.
“I am sorry to say, my lady, Hester Dethridge has broken out again.”