"Sure to be. But here comes James. Luncheon served, James, eh?"
They found the Colonel walking up and down the well-lighted hall smoking a cigarette. He was really a most inveterate smoker. He smoked before breakfast, after breakfast, all the forenoon, and all day long. Rolled his own cigarettes, too, so that his fore and middle fingers were indelibly stained yellow with the tobacco.
"Horrid habit!" he always told boys, "but I've become a slave to it. Don't you ever smoke."
Though some years over sixty, Trelawney was as straight as a telephone pole, handsome, and soldierly in face and bearing. The only thing that detracted from his facial appearance was a slight degree of bagginess betwixt the lower eyelids and the cheek bones. This was brought on, his doctor had told him often and often, by weakness of the heart caused by tobacco and wine. But Trelawney would not punish himself by leaving either off.
The boys took to Mrs. Trelawney from the very first. She must have been fully twenty years younger than the Colonel, and had a sweet, even beautiful, face, and was altogether winning.
Well, that was a luncheon of what might be called elegant kickshaws, artistically cooked and served, but eminently unsatisfactory from a Scotch point of view.
The dinner in the evening was much the same, and really when these Highland lads got up from the table they almost longed for the honest, "sonsy" fleshpots of Glenvoie.
Walnuts and wine for dessert! But they did not drink wine, and would have preferred a cocoa-nut or two to the walnuts. There would have been some satisfaction in that.
"You have often been at the theatre, dear, haven't you?"
This from Mrs. Trelawney, as she placed her very much be-ringed fingers on Conal's shoulder.
"No, auntie," replied Conal; "only just once, with Duncan there. It was in Glasgow. They were playing 'Rob Roy', and I shall never forget it. Never, never, never!"
But to-night it was a play of quite a different class, a kind of musical comedy. Plenty of action and go in it, plenty of the most ordinary and musicless singing, which pleased the gallery immensely, and frequent spells of idiotic dancing. There were no serious situations at all, however, and no thread of narrative woven into the play.