They went up to Cosmo’s room, to make it something fitter for a lady’s bower. Opening a certain chest, they took from it--stored there by his mother, Cosmo loved to think--another set of curtains, clean blankets, fine sheets, and a counterpane of silk patchwork, and put them all on the bed. With these, a white toilet-cover, and a chair or two from the drawing-room, they so changed the room that Cosmo declared he would not have known it. They then filled the grate with as much fuel as it would hold, and running fast down the two stairs, went again to the kitchen. At the door of it, however, Aggie gave her companion the slip, and set out to go back to her grannie at Muir o’ Warlock. Cosmo found the table spread for supper, the English lord sitting with his wine before him, and the lady in his grandmother’s chair, leaning back, and yawning wearily. Lord Mergwain looked muddled, and his daughter cast on him now and then a look that had in it more of annoyance than affection. He was not now a very pleasant lord to look on, whatever he might once have been. He was red-faced and blear-eyed, and his nose, partly from the snuff which he took in large quantity, was much injured in shape and colour: a closer description the historical muse declines. His eyes had once been blue, but tobacco, potations, revellings day and night--everything but tears, had washed from them almost all the colour. It added much to the strange unpleasantness of his appearance, that he wore a jet-black wig, so that to the unnatural came the untimely, and enhanced the withered. His mouth, which was full of false teeth, very white, and ill-fitting, had a cruel expression, and Death seemed to look out every time he grinned. As soon as he and Lady Joan were seated at the supper-table, with Grizzie to wait upon them, the laird and Cosmo left the kitchen, and went to the spare-room, for the laird judged that, in the temper and mistake her father was in, the lady would be more comfortable in their absence. “Cosmo,” he said, standing with his back to the fire, when he had again made it up, “I cannot help feeling as if I had known that man before. But I can recall no circumstances, and it may be a mere fancy. _You_ have never seen him before, my boy, have you?” “I don’t think I have, papa; and I don’t care if I never see him again,” answered Cosmo. “The lady is pretty, but not very pleasant, I think, though she is a lord’s daughter.” “Ah, but such a lord, Cosmo!” returned his father. “When a man goes on drinking like that, he is no better than a cheese under the spigot of a wine-cask; he lives to keep his body well soaked--that it may be the nicer, or the nastier for the worms. Cosmo, my son, don’t you learn to drown your soul in your body, like the poor Duke of Clarence in the wine-butt.”