ied.

"Where have you?" she retorted as she jumped out and let him help her
off with the driving coat.

They made a remarkably good-looking young couple standing together there
on the road and their manner to one another was evidently that of two
people who knew each other well. Sitting on his high driving seat, Ned
Cromarty turned his head well round so as to bring his sound eye to bear
and looked at them in silence. When she handed him his coat and thanked
him afresh, he merely laughed, told her, in his outspoken way, that all
the fun had been his, and whipped up his mare.

"That's more the sort of fellow!" he said to himself gloomily, and for a
little the thought seemed to keep him depressed. And then as he let the
recollections of their drive have their own way undisturbed, he began to
smile again, and kept smiling most of the way home.

The road drew ever nearer to the sea, trees and hedgerows grew even
rarer and more stunted, and then he was driving through a patch of
planting hardly higher than a shrubbery up to an ancient building on the
very brink of the cliffs. The sea crashed white below and stretched grey
and cold to the horizon, the wind whistled round the battlements and
sighed through the stunted trees, and Ned (who had been too absorbed to
remember his coat) slapped his arms and stamped his feet as he descended
before a nail-studded front door with a battered coat of arms above it.

"Lord, what a place!" he said to himself, half critically, half
affectionately.

The old castle of Stanesland was but a small house as castles, or even
mansions, go, almost devoid of architectural ornament and evidently
built in a sterner age simply for security, and but little embellished
by the taste of more degenerate times. As a specimen of a small early
15th Century castle it was excellent; as a home it was inconvenience
incarnate. How so many draughts found their way through such thick walls
was a perennial mystery, and how to convey dishes from the kitchen to
the dining room without their getting cold an almost insoluble problem.

The laird and his sister sat down to lunch and in about ten minutes Miss
Cromarty remarked,

"So you drove Cicely Farmond home?"

Her brother nodded. He had mentioned the fact as soon as he came in, and
rather wondered why she referred to it again.

Miss Cromarty smiled her own peculiar shrewd worldly little smile, and
said:

"You are very silent, Ned."

Lilian Cromarty was a f