Was it only a sensuous delight in the beautiful sky, the cool breezy atmosphere, the rustic calm? or was it because the happiest days of her life were to be spent on this weedy shore? If a coming sorrow casts its ominous shadow on the foredoomed creature who is to suffer it, should no prophetic sunshine herald the coming of a joy? Lady Cecil was happier that August evening than she ever remembered having been in her life, and there was a faint bloom on her cheeks, like the pinky heart of a wild rose, when she went home to the pretty cottage, half grange, half villa, which Mrs. MacClaverhouse had hired for the season--"for a mere song, my dear; and a duck, for which that extortionate Jiffles would have the audacity to charge me four shillings, I get here for half-a-crown," wrote the dowager to a friend and confidante. Cecil found her aunt in very high spirits. "You've heard me talk a good deal of my husband's nephew, Hector Gordon, the only son of Andrew Gordon, the great contractor. Yes, I know that a person who contracts seems something horribly vulgar, and that's what Margaret MacClaverhouse's grand friends said when she married him. But Andrew Gordon was as polished a gentleman as ever sat in parliament--and he did sit there, my dear, and he does to this day; and Scotchmen, whose pride has a good deal that's noble in it, don't think it a more degrading thing to make money honestly by straightforward commerce than to get rich by time-bargains and rigging the market. I know there are people to this day who are inclined to look down upon Hector, and when he joined the Eleventh there was one man--a freckled, flaxen-haired creature with weak eyes, whose father was a money-lending attorney--who tried to get up a laugh against our boy by asking some questions about Andrew's business transactions. I don't know _what_ Hector said or did, Cecil; but I know the young man never tried to sneer at him again, and sold out shortly afterwards because his sight was too weak for India. You've heard me talk about the boy till you are almost tired of his name, I dare say, my dear." Cecil smiled. She was thinking how many of Mrs. MacClaverhouse's pet subjects she had grown weary of within the two years of her slavery, and that this womanly talk of the favourite nephew was the least obnoxious of them. "It is only natural that you should be fond of him," she said.