Rowland could make no reply. He stood and stared blankly out of the window into the elderberry tree, and said no more. CHAPTER XI. “You will stay to your dinner?” Mrs. Brown said. The moment that these words, prompted by an inalienable Scotch hospitality, whose promptings are sometimes less than prudent, had left her lips, she reddened suddenly, and cast an alarmed look at Marion, who, for her part, was still standing contemplating her father, with a look in which a little defiance was concealed under a good deal of curiosity. The girl was considering how to approach and mollify this unknown parent, who, after all, was papa, the giver of all things, and upon whom was dependent the comfort, not to say grandeur, of life to come. It was a pity she had spoken so unadvisedly about his wife, but that, after all, was his own fault. Marion had some experience in novels, which supply so many precedents to the ignorant and young, and knew what a meeting between a father and his children ought to be. He ought to have taken them into his paternal arms. She, the girl, ought to have thrown herself upon his bosom in tears and rapture. He ought to have lifted his eyes to the skies or the ceiling, and have said: “Just like this was her mother when I saw her first!” None of these things had been done, and the girl was a little at fault. To look at his back as he stood at the window, evidently out of temper, discouraged and discouraging, was a thing that suggested no kind of original procedure to her mind. And she was consequently of no manner of comfort to her anxious aunt, who had instantly remembered that the midday dinner of the family was nothing but hotch-potch. And how was she to set down a rich man, who fared sumptuously every day, to a dinner of hotch-potch? Marion’s mind was occupied with much more important things. How was she to do away with the disadvantages of that first introduction, and make herself agreeable to papa? A girl in a novel, she began to think, would steal up to him and put her arm through his, where he stood looking out into the elderberry tree, and lean her head upon his shoulder, and perhaps say “Dear papa!” But Marion’s courage was not quite equal to that. As for Archie, he simply stood still and stared, too completely taken by surprise to make any movement whatever, contemplating his father’s back with unspoken disappointment and dismay. “Weel,” said Mrs. Brown, after waiting in vain for a response, seizing dexterously the opportunity of escape; “I’ll just leave ye to make acquaintance with one another, for I have things to see to in the house; and Marion, you’ll just see that your papa has a glass of wine, for the dinner, as you’re aware, is no till two o’clock. I’ll send in the girl with the tray--she ought to have been here before now--and I’ll leave you two to entertain your papaw.”