LADY KILPATRICK By Robert Buchanan A New Edition London Chatto & Windus 1898 [Illustration: 0001] [Illustration: 0009] LADY KILPATRICK CHAPTER I.--INTRODUCES DESMOND AND DULCIE. On a summer evening, twenty years ago, a girl and a youth were strolling slowly along the strip of yellow sands which leads from the verge of the Atlantic to the steep line of rock dominated by Kilpatrick Castle. The girl, who was not more than seventeen years of age, carried her hat and parasol in her hand: the first a serviceable article, little superior in form and material to that generally worn by the superior peasants of the district; the other a dainty trifle in pale blue silk, better in keeping with the tailor-made dress and dainty French shoes in which its owner was dressed. She had a delightfully fair and fresh complexion, a little freckled by a too free exposure to the sun, and her dark blue eyes shone from under the rather disorderly waves of her light golden hair with an expression of harmless audacity and frank gaiety eloquent of youth and health and innocence. Her companion, who might have been three or four years her senior, was a long-limbed, supple youngster of the finest Western Irish type. His hair, long, black and curly, escaped in natural ripples from under a battered soft felt hat, and framed an olive-hued face of great strength and delicacy, lit by a pair of black eyes sparkling with honest, boyish impudence. The merest shade of callow down darkened his upper lip. He was clad in rough and rather ill-cut tweeds, stained in brown patches with salt water, and the collar of a flannel shirt, innocent of stud or necktie, left to view a sun-tanned, muscular throat. His long legs kept swinging pace with the tripping lightness of the girl’s walk, and he looked down at her from his superior height with a mingling of admiration and protection very pretty to witness, and of which she was perhaps a shade too obviously unconscious. ‘We shall be late for dinner,’ said the girl, breaking the first silence which had fallen upon them since the beginning of a long day’s ramble. ‘Uncle will be angry.’ ‘Sorra a bit,’ replied the boy. ‘The old gentleman’s temper’s queer at times, but it has to be mighty bad before he’s angry with _you_. And as to being angry with _me_, sure I’m used to it. It’s not often he’s anything else.’ ‘My uncle is very fond of you,’ said the girl, ‘and very kind to you--kinder than you deserve, most people think.’ ‘Your uncle!’ repeated the boy. ‘Which of ’em?’ ‘Lord Kilpatrick, of course!’ ‘Indeed he is, then! He’s been as good as a father to me nearly all my life. I owe to him all I have and all I am.’ ‘Tell me, Desmond,’ said the girl, after another short interval of silence, ‘why does Lord Kilpatrick take so great an interest in you, and yet let you run about like--like a young colt? Isn’t it time that you began to take life seriously, and to think of doing something?’