If he was good-looking it was only in the handsome-ugly sense. Mrs. Rossiter often said he was the one member of the family who inherited from the Brews of Boston, a statement I could verify from the first Mrs. Brokenshire's portrait by Carolus-Duran. Hugh's features were not ill-formed so much as they were out of proportion to each other, becoming thus a mere jumble of organs. The blue eyes were too small and too wide apart; the forehead was too broad for its height; the nose, which started at the same fine angle as his father's, changed in mid-course to a knob; the upper lip was intended to be long, but half-way in its descent took a notion to curve upward, making a hollow for a tender, youthful, fair mustache that didn't quite meet in the center and might have been applied with a camel's-hair brush; the lower lip turned outward with a little fullness that spilled over in a little fall, giving to the whole expression something lovably good-natured. Because the sea boiled over the ledges and scraped on the pebbles with a screechy sound we were obliged to sit close together in order to make ourselves heard. His arm about me was amazingly protective. I felt safe. The account of his interview with his father was too incoherent to give me more than the idea that they had talked somewhat at cross-purposes. To Hugh's statement that he wished to marry Miss Adare, the little nursery governess at Ethel's, his father had responded by reading a letter from Lord Goldborough inviting Hugh to his place in Scotland for the shooting. "It would be well for you to accept," the father commented, as he folded the letter. "I've cabled to Goldborough to say you'd sail on--" "But, father, how can I sail when I've asked Miss Adare to marry me?" To this the reply was the mention of the steamer and the date. He went on to say, however: "If you've asked any one to marry you it's absurd, of course. But I'll take care of that. If you go by that boat you'll reach London in plenty of time to fit out at your tailor's and still be at Strath-na-Cloid by the twelfth. In case you're short of money--" Apparently they got no further than that. To Hugh's assertions and objections his father had but one response. It was a response, as I understood, which confronted the younger man like a wall he had neither the force to break down nor the agility to climb over, and left him staring at a blank.