'Now, what the devil is all this to _him_?' thought the baronet, malevolently; and he had hardihood enough to give his thought expression, on which Colville's face grew darker still. 'Sir Redmond,' said he, 'there is no use in beating about the bush with you. I have often heard you say that there was but one excuse in this world for matrimony.' 'Yes--well?' 'Miss Ellinor Wellwood is poor, as you may say, yet you seem very attentive in that quarter.' Confounded at what he deemed the presumption of all these queries, Sleath stuck his glass into his right eye, and glared through it at his companion with undoubted surprise. 'Attention,' he muttered; 'not at all! Who is thinking of matrimony? And if I were so, may I ask what it is to _you_?' 'More than you think,' replied Colville, with suppressed passion, as he adjusted his shirt cuffs; 'but enough of this subject--here is the gate of Craigmhor.' Colville said no more; but he thought a good deal, and he muttered to himself a Spanish proverb, '_Puerto abierta, al santo tiento_--the open door tempts the saint; and, by Jove, this fellow is no saint--so I shall keep my eye on him!' Hitherto it had seemed to Ellinor, but to Mary chiefly (as she had no special admirer), that life had been dull and colourless--if a happy and contented one--at Birkwoodbrae; and already the days thereof--before these visitors came--seemed to be part of another and remoter existence; for love and the illusions of love were shedding their haloes over the present. 'I hope dear Mary Wellwood will not make a fool of herself with that Captain Colville,' said Mrs. Wodrow to her spouse, with reference to this very subject. 'I hear that he has been calling at Birkwoodbrae again, though engaged, they say, to Miss Galloway. She is old enough to know that officers are the greatest flirts in the world--men not to be trusted. When _I_ was a girl, I always heard so.' Dr. Wodrow laughed softly, as he looked up from the notes of his next sermon, and said, 'I don't think, my dear, you ever had much experience of them out of novels; but I will own to you that officers now-a-days are not like what they were at one time. Even my worthy ancestor, in 1724, deplores in his 'Analecta' that Christian officers had left no successors to such men as Colonel Blackadder, of the Cameronians, Colonel Erskine, and Major Gardiner, of Stair's Grey Dragoons--all men who could expound on the Gospel better than I.' CHAPTER X. THE GARDEN-PARTY AT CRAIGMHOR. It was the afternoon of a hot day early in August, when the sunlight bathed in glory all the scenery--green mountain and rocky glen, wood and water--about Craigmhor, giving alternately strong light and deep shadow, with a warmth of colouring over all, turning into a sheet like molten gold an artificial lochlet, where the ducks and coots swam together among the great white water-lilies.