CHAPTER I. ‘Whom does love concern save the lover and the beloved? Yet its impact deluges a thousand shores.’ E. M. FORSTER. Sir Mark Forsyth pushed back his chair, left the dinner-table, and strolled over to the bay window. He drew out his cigarette-case, but apparently forgot to open it. He stood there, looking out across the garden, that merged into rocky spaces of heather and bracken, and culminated in an abrupt descent to the loch. Low above the darkening hills the sunset splendour flamed along the horizon, and all the waters beneath were alight with the transient glory. But the man’s face wore the abstracted air of one who dwells upon an inner vision. Though the subdued flow of talk behind him entered his ears, it did not seem to reach his brain. ‘Bobs,’ his devoted Irish terrier, crept out from under the table and, joining his master, made sundry infallible bids for attention, without success. Presently alluring whiffs of cigarette smoke, intruding on his dreams, reminded Sir Mark of the unopened case in his hand. ‘I vote for coffee on the terrace, Mother,’ he said, turning his eyes from the glory without to the dimness of the unlighted dining room. ‘Then we’ll have the boats out. There’s going to be an afterglow and a half presently.’ ‘I told Grant about the coffee two minutes ago, dear,’ Lady Forsyth answered, smiling; but her eyes dwelt a little anxiously on the silhouetted view of her son’s profile, as he set a match to his cigarette. The straight, outstanding nose and square chin vividly recalled his dead father. But the imaginative brow was of her bestowing, and a splash of light on his hair showed the reddish chestnut tint of her own people: the tint she loved. ‘Come along, children,’ she added, including in that category four out of her five guests—two girls, unrelated to herself, Ralph Melrose, a Gurkha subaltern, and Maurice Lenox, an artist friend of Mark’s. Keith Macnair, professor of philosophy—his rugged face lined with thought, his dark hair lightly frosted at the temples—was the only genuine grown-up of her small house-party. A connection of her own, and devoted to both mother and son, he was so evenly placed between them in the matter of age that he could play elder brother to Mark or younger brother to Lady Forsyth as occasion required. And, whenever professional claims permitted, occasion usually did require his presence, in some capacity, either at Wynchcombe Friars or Inveraig. Between times, he lived and lectured and wrote philosophical books in Edinburgh, having been a Fellow of the University since his graduate days: and never, if he could help it, did he fail to spend most of the long vacation at Inveraig.