"I am not the sort of person to be fascinated by Captain Gordon's money, Aunt MacClaverhouse," she said. "Perhaps not," answered the old lady, coolly; "but you may fall in love with him." Cecil was too angry to answer. That the dowager should talk coolly of Hector Gordon, the contractor's son, as a great catch for the descendant of Aspendells and Chudleighs who had helped to vanquish his countrymen at Flodden, stung the Earl's daughter to the very heart. She had so little but her grand old lineage left her, that it was scarcely strange she should be proud of it. There came a time, not many weeks after this August evening, when she looked back thought what a delicious thing it must have been to have her name coupled with _his_, and to be ignorant that there was any wrong in the association. But to-night she was wounded and indignant, and though she went out into the kitchen-premises by-and-by to give orders about the cutlets, and the soles, and the potted meats for the Plunger Captain's breakfast, her heart was not in the duty, and she sent none of those little messages to the butcher which a woman would have done who loved the coming cutlet-consumer. She thought how unpleasant it would be to have a clumsy Scottish invalid lying on the sofa in the cosy little drawing-room, where she had hoped to read Tennyson and Owen Meredith all by herself in the warm, drowsy afternoons. And the time came, and so soon, when no sofa that Gillow could devise would have seemed soft enough for so dear a visitor; when every glimmer of sunshine or breath of summer air in that cosy drawing-room was watched and calculated as closely as if a valuable life had depended upon the adjustment of the Venetians, or the opening and shutting of the French windows. Lady Cecil went out upon the seashore after an early cup of tea on the morning that was to witness Hector Gordon's arrival. She had arranged a pile of dewy plums nestling in their dark green leaves, and a basket of hothouse grapes, with her own hands, for she had the magical touch whereby some women can impart beauty to common things. She had surveyed the breakfast-table, and had given orders as to the moment at which the tea and coffee were to be made, and the fish put into the frying-pan; and she left a message for her aunt to the effect that she was gone for a long walk, and would not be home to breakfast. It would be so much better, she fancied, to leave the widow and her nephew _tête-à-tête_ on this first morning of the soldier's arrival. She had done her duty conscientiously, and having done it, she went out to breathe the sweet morning air, and shake off the unpleasant idea of the coming Scotchman.