He also was changed. He had thrown away his cigar while Cecil was lingering in her own room, and had gone into the little breakfast-parlour, where his aunt sat with an unread newspaper in her hand, brooding over her niece's folly. She looked up as Hector entered, and began to talk to him. The conversation was a very brief one, and the Captain had little share in it; but when he went back to the garden his face was grave and downcast; and when he handed Cecil into the carriage, she was struck by the gloomy preoccupation of his manner. Of all the excursions they had enjoyed together, that excursion was the least agreeable. The September wind was bleak and chilly, penetrating the warmest folds of Mrs. MacClaverhouse's Indian shawl, and tweaking the end of her aristocratic nose. The brown moorlands and bare stubble-fields had a barren look against the cold grey sky; and the Captain, generally as much _aux petits soins_ with regard to the two ladies as if he had been the adoring son of the one and the accepted lover of the other, sat in a gloomy reverie, and seemed to arouse himself by an effort whenever he uttered some commonplace remark upon the weather or the scenery. There was very little conversation during dinner; and Captain Gordon made so poor a pretence of eating that the dowager became positively alarmed, and declared that her boy was ill. "It is no use talking, Hector," she exclaimed, though her nephew had only made a half-articulate murmur to the effect that there was nothing the matter with him. "You eat no fish, and you only helped yourself to a wing of that chicken; and you sent your plate away with that almost untouched--a very extravagant mode of sending your plate away, I should say, if you were a poor man. You've not been yourself all day, Hector; so I shall insist on your being nursed this evening. You won't take any fruit, I know; for fruit is bilious.--Never mind the dessert to-day, Mowatt," the widow said, addressing her parlour-maid; "and be sure the fruit is kept in a cool dry place till to-morrow," she added _sotto voce_, as she cast a sharply-scrutinising glance upon the dishes of grapes and apricots. The widow insisted that her nephew was ill and tired; and as the Captain seemed oppressed by a kind of languor which made him quite unequal to offer any opposition to such an energetic person as his aunt, he gave way, and suffered himself to be installed in a reclining attitude on the most comfortable sofa, with an Indian shawl spread over him like the counterpane of a state bed. "And now Cecil shall play us both to sleep," said Mrs. MacClaverhouse, sinking into her own chair.