"Hot! you ungrateful, untravelled country squire! I should like to fasten you to a life-buoy in the middle of the Red Sea. Why do Englishmen perspire in every pore the moment the thermometer's above zero in their own land, and yet stand the tropics better than any other Europeans?" "You know I've sold Achnalorrie?" says his host, _à propos de rien_, but to him Achnalorrie seems _à propos_ of everything in creation. Brandolin is surprised, but he does not show any surprise. "Ah! Quite right, too. If we wished to please the Radicals we couldn't find any way to please them and injure ourselves equal to our insane fashion of keeping hundreds of square acres at an enormous cost, only that for a few weeks in the summer we may do to death some of the most innocent and graceful of God's creatures." "That's just the bosh Dolly talks." "Lady Usk is a wise politician, then. Let her train Boom for his political life. I don't know which is the more utterly indefensible,--our enormous Highland deer-slaughter or our imbecile butchery of birds. They ought to have recorded the introduction of battue-shooting into the British Isles by the Great and Good on the Albert Memorial." "One must shoot something." "I never saw why. But 'something' honestly found by a setter in stubble, and three thousand head of game between five guns in a morning, are very different things. What did they give you for Achnalorrie?" Usk discourses of Achnalorrie with breathless eloquence, as of a lover eulogizing the charms of a mistress forever lost to him. Brandolin listens with admirable patience, and affects to agree that the vision of the American crawling on his stomach over soaking heather in a thick fog for eight hours after a "stag of ten" is a vision of such unspeakably enviable bliss that it must harrow the innermost soul of the dispossessed lord of the soil. "And yet, do you know," he says, in conclusion, "I am such a degenerate mortal, such an unworthy 'son of a gun,' that I would actually sooner be sitting in these lovely, sunny, shady gardens, where one expects to see all Spenser's knights coming through the green shadows towards one, than I would be the buyer of Achnalorrie, even in the third week of August?" "You say so, but you don't mean it," says the seller of Achnalorrie. "I never say what I don't mean," says Brandolin. "And I never cared about Scotland." The other smokes dejectedly, and refuses to be comforted. "Lady Waverley isn't here?" asks Brandolin, with a certain significance. Lady Waverley alone would have the power of making the torturing vision of the American among the heather fade into the background of her host's reflections. CHAPTER II. "Dolly is nasty about Achnalorrie," says Lord Usk, as they at last rise and approach the house. "Not logical if she objects to moors on political principles. But ladies are seldom logical when they are as charming as Lady Usk." "She never likes me to enjoy anything."