"We have all been trying that remedy," put in Eustace. "What with the men coming in, and the boats being engaged, we shall want more whiskey to-morrow, Wilson." "No, we shan't," retorted his host quickly; "I mean it's beastly stuff, you know. I never take anything but claret myself." "Awfully difficult to get decent claret nowadays," remarked Eustace with the ease, to him so delightfully new, of the rich man who quarrels with the supply and not the price. So the topic passed. "I'll have a cigar and go to bed; I didn't sleep a bit last night," said Mr. Wilson shortly after they returned to the bare drawing-room, guiltless of all decoration, where Lady Maud's Parisian teagown looked so oddly out of place. "Take some hot whiskey and water," laughed his wife. "Won't you all go to the smoking-room? You must be tired, professor, after your long walk." But the learned man's social beliefs forbade cigars when a charming woman was the alternative, so he elected to remain. Being in reality much fatigued, however, he shortly afterwards gave way to the seductions of semi-darkness and an arm-chair. Semi-darkness because Kirsty's lamp smoking horribly, they preferred the light of the blazing peat fire. Outside the wind crooned round the house,--a lullaby to ears acquainted with its other notes, but to those accustomed to the stillness of the south, a banshee wail of coming trouble. With the firelight playing on the jet agraffes which held the cunning draperies on her gleaming bust and arms, Lady Maud was a picture few men could look on absolutely unmoved; but if Eustace Gordon felt the charm of her beauty, he gave no sign of it as yet. They sate there in the semi-darkness side by side, sometimes silent, sometimes talking indifferently of indifferent subjects. Alone, as utterly alone in the world as if they two were the only man and woman in it; for the barrier which luxury raises between one human being and another had given way. Supposing, for instance, the butler, instead of bobbing up and down on the Minch in the _Clansman_, had been at his post, would they have been sitting in semi-darkness uninterrupted by inroads for coffee cups, peats, and candles? Again, would any really high-class butler have permitted Professor Endorwick to snooze undisturbed in his chair, for two hours on end? Not that he did any harm by his slumbers; he might have awakened at any moment and joined unhesitatingly in the desultory talk of those two. True enough; yet when, at last, Eustace did rouse the learned man by lighting Lady Maud's candle, they both felt that the tête-à-tête had not left them quite as it found them; that in some of those half-indifferent ordinary remarks a virtue had gone out of them.