f yours. You are very closely allied to
the Percies, and the Saltires have Percy blood in them also. They are
only a cadet branch, and you are close upon the main line; but still it
is not for us to deny the connection." She brought a cold sweat out upon
me by suggesting that she should make things easy by writing to Lord
Saltire and explaining our respective positions. Several times during
the evening I heard her murmur complacently that they were only the
cadet branch.

Am I not the slowest of story-tellers? But you encourage me to it by
your sympathetic interest in details. However, I shall move along a
little faster now. Next morning I was off to Lochtully, which, as you
know, is in the north of Perthshire. It stands three miles from the
station, a great gray pinnacled house, with two towers cocking out above
the fir woods, like a hare's ears from a tussock of grass. As we drove
up to the door I felt pretty solemn--not at all as the main line should
do when it condescends to visit the cadet branch. Into the hall as I
entered came a grave learned-looking man, with whom in my nervousness
I was about to shake hands cordially. Fortunately he forestalled the
impending embrace by explaining that he was the butler. He showed
me into a small study, where everything stank of varnish and morocco
leather, there to await the great man. He proved when he came to be a
much less formidable figure than his retainer--indeed, I felt thoroughly
at my ease with him from the moment he opened his mouth. He is grizzled,
red-faced, sharp-featured, with a prying and yet benevolent expression,
very human and just a trifle vulgar. His wife, however, to whom I
was afterwards introduced, is a most depressing person,--pale, cold,
hatchet-faced, with drooping eyelids and very prominent blue veins at
her temples. She froze me up again just as I was budding out under the
influence of her husband. However, the thing that interested me most
of all was to see my patient, to whose room I was taken by Lord Saltire
after we had had a cup of tea.

The room was a large bare one, at the end of a long corridor. Near the
door was seated a footman, placed there to fill up the gap between two
doctors, and looking considerably relieved at my advent. Over by the
window (which was furnished with a wooden guard, like that of a nursery)
sat a tall, yellow-haired, yellow-bearded, young man, who raised a pair
of startled blue eyes as we entered. He was turning over t