ain at the blotting-pad. "Yes--the marriage."

Arnold offered his hand in congratulation. Geoffrey never noticed it.
His eyes were off the blotting-pad again. He was looking out of the
window near him.

"Don't I hear voices outside?" he asked.

"I believe our friends are in the garden," said Arnold. "Sir Patrick may
be among them. I'll go and see."

The instant his back was turned Geoffrey snatched up a sheet of
note-paper. "Before I forget it!" he said to himself. He wrote the word
"Memorandum" at the top of the page, and added these lines beneath it:

"He asked for her by the name of his wife at the door. He said, at
dinner, before the landlady and the waiter, 'I take these rooms for my
wife.' He made _her_ say he was her husband at the same time. After
that he stopped all night. What do the lawyers call this in
Scotland?--(Query: a marriage?)"

After folding up the paper he hesitated for a moment. "No!" he thought,
"It won't do to trust to what Miss Lundie said about it. I can't be
certain till I have consulted Sir Patrick himself."

He put the paper away in his pocket, and wiped the heavy perspiration
from his forehead. He was pale--for _him,_ strikingly pale--when Arnold
came back.

"Any thing wrong, Geoffrey?--you're as white as ashes."

"It's the heat. Where's Sir Patrick?"

"You may see for yourself."

Arnold pointed to the window. Sir Patrick was crossing the lawn, on
his way to the library with a newspaper in his hand; and the guests at
Windygates were accompanying him. Sir Patrick was smiling, and saying
nothing. The guests were talking excitedly at the tops of their voices.
There had apparently been a collision of some kind between the old
school and the new. Arnold directed Geoffrey's attention to the state of
affairs on the lawn.

"How are you to consult Sir Patrick with all those people about him?"

"I'll consult Sir Patrick, if I take him by the scruff of the neck and
carry him into the next county!" He rose to his feet as he spoke those
words, and emphasized them under his breath with an oath.

Sir Patrick entered the library, with the guests at his heels.

CHAPTER THE NINETEENTH.

CLOSE ON IT.

THE object of the invasion of the library by the party in the garden
appeared to be twofold.

Sir Patrick had entered the room to restore the newspaper to the place
from which he had taken it. The guests, to the number of five, had
followed him, to appeal in a body to Geoffrey Delamayn.