"Oh, Mary!" cries her friend, "why did you not tell us? Have you parted with everything?"
"The money?" says the girl—with her white face, and frightened pathetic eyes. "Oh, I do not care about the money! It has got nothing to do with the money. But—but—he—was my mother's only brother."
The lips tremble for a moment; but she collects herself. Her courage fights through the stun of this sudden blow.
"I will not believe it!" she says. "How dare they say such things of him? How is it we have never seen anything of it in the papers?"
But the Laird leaves these and other wild questions to be answered at leisure. In the meantime, his eyes are burning like coals of fire; and he is twisting his hands together in a vain endeavour to repress his anger and indignation.
"Tell them to put a horse to," he says in a voice the abruptness of which startles every one. "I want to drive to the telegraph-office. This is a thing for men to deal wi'—not weemen."
CHAPTER II.
AN ULTIMATUM.
When our good friend the Laird of Denny-mains came back from the post-office, he seemed quite beside himself with wrath. And yet his rage was not of the furious and loquacious sort; it was reticent, and deep, and dangerous. He kept pacing up and down the gravel-path in front of the house, while as yet dinner was not ready. Occasionally he would rub his hands vehemently, as if to get rid of some sort of electricity; and once or twice we heard him ejaculate to himself, "The scoondrel! The scoondrel!" It was in vain that our gentle Queen Titania, always anxious to think the best of everybody, broke in on these fierce meditations, and asked the Laird to suspend his judgment. How could he be sure, she asked, that Frederick Smethurst had really run away with his niece's little property? He had come to her and represented that he was in serious difficulties; that this temporary loan of seven thousand pounds or so would save him; that he would repay her directly certain remittances came to him from abroad. How could he, the Laird, know that Frederick Smethurst did not mean to keep his promise?
But Denny-mains would have none of these possibilities. He saw the whole story clearly. He had telegraphed for confirmation; but already he was convinced. As for Frederick Smethurst being a swindler—that did not concern him, he said. As for the creditors, that was their own look-out: men in business had to take their chance. But that this miscreant, this ruffian, this mean hound should have robbed his own niece of her last farthing—and left her absolutely without resources or protection of any kind in the world—this it was that made the Laird's eyes burn with a dark fire. "The scoondrel!—the scoondrel!" he said; and he rubbed his hands as though he would wrench the fingers off.