e asked him to stay and lunch with us."

Sir Andrew bowed stiffly and then extended a blue-veined and tremulous
hand. Cleek took it and bent over it like a courtier.

"Very pleased indeed to see you, Mr. Deland," said Sir Andrew, in a
deep, full-throated voice that spoke more of the man he had been than of
the man he was now. "You are welcome to our hospitality now and at any
other time."

"I am deeply grateful, sir, and during my short stay in these parts I
shall hope to make fuller acquaintance of you and your family--your
wife? How do you do, Lady Paula? I am enamoured of your charming
surroundings and your glorious home. May I be permitted to congratulate
you upon both?"

A fleet look flashed from her eyes, a swift warmth of friendship for
this stranger who made her so much _one_ of them who had never yet been
made one by the family themselves.

"It is beautiful, isn't it?" Smooth as velvet her voice, warm, subtle,
alluring as the country that gave her birth. "I love it--_how_ I love
it! Even though I am not of the Scotch blood, yet have I that birthright
of my nation--home-love. Maud, dear, take Mr. Deland round, won't you? I
have still some matters to arrange with your father, so you must do the
honours in my stead. And when Sir Andrew and I have finished with our
little _personal_ matters"--she smiled suddenly, showing a flash of
snowy teeth between the warm red lips which Time had not yet cooled to
the more even tenor of England's blood--"then we will join you upon the
terrace. And be sure and show Mr. Deland the electric-lighting plant,
dear. He will be interested."

Maud Duggan flashed her a look of absolute hatred at this, for she saw
the darkening shade upon her father's face, and noted the sudden
clenching of the hand upon his stick.

"Cursed modernism and all its extravagant ways!" said the old gentleman
in a bitter voice. "Spending that which he should have saved, sir, upon
a ridiculous experiment which has ruined the atmosphere of the place
entirely. Wayward fool!"

"But it has improved your reading faculties, anyhow, Father," put in
Miss Duggan in a quiet, resolute voice. "Paula is not nearly so busy
nowadays, when you can read your own papers----"

"As though I _ever_ wanted to do anything but wait upon him--dear man!"
struck in Lady Paula reproachfully, and with an arch glance at Cleek
which did not go unrewarded. "Your father is not so old a man as to be
in his dotage. And if there _is_ tw