She gave Lord Carthew a long, nerveless, white hand in greeting, and inquired after his friend, expressing her regret at the accident. Even while answering her polite inquiries, Claud’s eyes involuntarily travelled to the face of Miss Cranstoun, who, dressed in a girlish dinner costume of ivory silk, sat beside Dr. Morland Graham. In the lamplight she looked even more attractive than in the half-obscurity in which he had before seen her. Her cheeks had but little color as contrasted with the vivid scarlet of her lips, but to Lord Carthew’s keenly observant eyes, this pallor, and the extraordinary brightness of her eyes, suggested in no way ill health, but rather a vivid and ardent nature under strong repression. Her gown was cut low about the throat, and the sleeves were little more than elbow length, showing off the fairness and purity of her skin and the delicacy of her slim wrists. A turquoise brooch was her only ornament, and seemed to carry out in color the intense blue of her eyes between the black pupils and the nearly purple borders to the iris. Her whole appearance was poetic and interesting in a high degree, but the young viscount remarked that her manner had lost something of its naïve frankness, and had become more sedate and restrained than before. “I am the more interested in Lord Carthew,” Lady Cranstoun was saying, “because we are connections. Lord Northborough’s mother was a Douglas, and my aunt.” She spoke in slow, unmusical tones, with a slight Scotch accent. Lord Carthew rightly judged that, being a Douglas, she would have an exaggerated pride of birth, which was indeed the poor lady’s chief weakness. A single question from him sufficed to start her on her favorite subject of the numerous marriages and relationships of her father, the Duke of Lanark’s, family. As her appetite was poor, and no one could be rude enough to interrupt her at her own table, she was soon deep in the intricacies of the Douglas ancestry and Douglas marriages, while Dr. Graham set himself steadily to enjoy the good fare before him, and Miss Cranstoun kept her eyes steadily fixed on her plate, her cheeks flushed, and her dark eyebrows contracted with annoyance. The dinner was good, the wines were few but excellent, and the greater part of the table service was in solid old silver, adorned with the motto “Cranstoun, Remember,” and the mailed hand grasping a wolf’s head, which was the family device. Opposite Lord Carthew, as he sat at table, there hung a portrait of a man in armor, whose sinister light eyes seemed to follow his every movement. Look which way he would, from Stella Cranstoun’s beautiful face to the doctor’s plump, bland visage, or Lady Cranstoun’s washed-out countenance, Lord Carthew found his gaze fascinated and held by the pale, square, inscrutable face of the man in armor, about whose narrow, close-shut lips a bitter smile seemed to be playing.