came in sight of the house of Cairn Ferris with its doors
and windows wrecked and broken, at the mending of which the joiners of
the estate and others from Stranryan were at that moment busy. He passed
a heap of broken furniture still huddled together and smoking in a
corner, at which he stood still and cursed as he if had been Adam Ferris
himself.

He did not love the man nor his family. But Ferris was a gentleman and a
neighbour. Only let him get to London. He would make the ears of these
Hanover rats lie back when he told them an honest man's opinion of them
on some day of great debate. Oh, it was not the first time he had
spoken. Hear him they must and hear him they should.

Earl Raincy reached the new house of Abbey Burnfoot in safety. As he
came out of the birches of the glen among which the path played hide and
seek, he saw the climbing roses and red tropeolum mounting almost to the
roof, the full dusky green of the hops twining to the chimney tops and
setting a-swing questing tendrils from every balcony. The old man had
never before seen such a building, but in an illustrated book of travels
he had come across something like it. So his heart expanded when he
thought of his own austere baronial keep and the crow-stepped bluestone
gables of his ancestors' many additions. The newest of those was four
hundred years old, and was only beginning to lose its look of having
been finished yesterday.

He shrugged his shoulders at Julian's foreign-appearing palace of
pleasure.

"Very well, I dare say," he muttered; "but what will it be after a few
hundred winters?"

He did not pause to think what in such circumstances he would be
himself. Raincy ground would still uphold Castle Raincy. Raincys would
still dwell there, but this little dainty playhouse on the sands of the
Abbey Burn would long ago have been swept away by centuries of Solway
storms. The thought re-established him in his own esteem, and even the
Ferris rule of the coveted Twin Valleys seemed evanescent and fleeting
as a cloud on a mountain side beside the invincible eternity of the
Raincy dominion.

He knocked at the door and waited. The man who came was Julian's
Austrian valet Joseph, courteous, grave, and exquisitely "styled," as
was fitting for the house of an ex-ambassador.

"Would his excellency enter? Joseph regretted much that the Earl should
not find Mr. Julian. But he had been summoned to London. Yes, certainly,
Mr. Adam was somewhere on the b