'One was a threat from a tailor,' replied Holcroft, making a terrible effort to appear facetious, 'who says if I don't pay him he will take means to make me do so.' 'And you?' 'Wrote back that I was delighted to hear he had the means, as this was more than I had.' 'Well, my dear fellow, your father was one of my oldest friends; for his sake can I square it for you?' 'Oh, Lord Aberfeldie, don't think of that!' 'What's the total?'' asked the other, opening a davenport. 'Close on £500,' said Holcroft, with an effort, which certainly was an emotion, but not gratitude. 'There, Holcroft--pay me when you can, or choose,' said Lord Aberfeldie, throwing down his pen, closing the davenport, and handing a cheque for the sum named to his guest, to stop whose thanks he plunged at once into the inevitable story of the charge of the Black Watch along the Kourgané Hill; how he fell wounded; and how, but for Holcroft's father, 'a squad of infernal Russians,' _et cetera_, and so forth. 'Another glass of Moët, and then we shall join the ladies.' 'Life is a hard game with some of us now,' said Holcroft, as he pocketed his cheque. 'As some one has written, "Men cannot go freebooting or looting now, except in business; and it is quite a question whether a modern _promoter_ is not quite as respectable a member of society as a riever used to be, in the old days when right was might." 'And Dundargue was built,' added Lord Aberfeldie, laughing. 'I did not say so.' 'Ah, but you thought it.' And now they rose from the table. Holcroft was not the better, but rather the worse for his potations. He had eaten little and drunk much. Thus he looked very pale--almost ghastly; and a strange fixed grimness replaced occasionally the usual restlessness of his shifty pale eyes and freckled face. Curiously enough he had hovering in his mind a kind of vengeance just then at Olive. But for her sudden, and, as he thought, capricious preference for her cousin, and throwing _him_ so completely over, the deed he had committed would never have been done. Eveline had withdrawn to her room, whither her mother had followed her, bent on worry and expostulation no doubt; Lord Aberfeldie was required by his steward, and Holcroft found Olive seated alone in a bay window of the drawing-room, watching the last rays of the sun fading out behind the Sidlaw Hills. 'Another hour--even less, Miss Raymond--and my place here will be vacant,' said he, in a low and unnatural voice, while attempting to hang over her chair in his old fashion. 'I got back my bangle, thanks,' said she, a little irrelevantly, but feeling a necessity for saying something. 'Have you forgotten all that passed between us before and after you allowed me to retain it.' 'I never allowed you to retain it, nor aught of mine, save perhaps a bud from a bouquet. I have not forgotten that you, apparently, sought to do me a great honour, Mr. Holcroft; but I scarcely thought, even then, that you were serious.'