"Take some hot whiskey and water," laughed his wife. "Won't you all go to the smoking-room? You must be tired, professor, after your long walk."
But the learned man's social beliefs forbade cigars when a charming woman was the alternative, so he elected to remain. Being in reality much fatigued, however, he shortly afterwards gave way to the seductions of semi-darkness and an arm-chair. Semi-darkness because Kirsty's lamp smoking horribly, they preferred the light of the blazing peat fire. Outside the wind crooned round the house,--a lullaby to ears acquainted with its other notes, but to those accustomed to the stillness of the south, a banshee wail of coming trouble. With the firelight playing on the jet agraffes which held the cunning draperies on her gleaming bust and arms, Lady Maud was a picture few men could look on absolutely unmoved; but if Eustace Gordon felt the charm of her beauty, he gave no sign of it as yet. They sate there in the semi-darkness side by side, sometimes silent, sometimes talking indifferently of indifferent subjects. Alone, as utterly alone in the world as if they two were the only man and woman in it; for the barrier which luxury raises between one human being and another had given way. Supposing, for instance, the butler, instead of bobbing up and down on the Minch in the _Clansman_, had been at his post, would they have been sitting in semi-darkness uninterrupted by inroads for coffee cups, peats, and candles? Again, would any really high-class butler have permitted Professor Endorwick to snooze undisturbed in his chair, for two hours on end? Not that he did any harm by his slumbers; he might have awakened at any moment and joined unhesitatingly in the desultory talk of those two. True enough; yet when, at last, Eustace did rouse the learned man by lighting Lady Maud's candle, they both felt that the tête-à-tête had not left them quite as it found them; that in some of those half-indifferent ordinary remarks a virtue had gone out of them.
She took the light from him, decidedly, with a refusal of his offer to pilot her along the dark passages; angry with herself for the very thought, she still felt that it would be wiser to say good-night here under the professor's eye; and as she went up the dim staircase, she paused to give a glance at the sea with a wonder as to when Louisa would find calm or courage enough to attempt the voyage. In a vague way, she recognized that things would go more comfortably if she were there. But beyond a sense of motion in the deep grey plane stretching away to a paler grey horizon, she could see nothing. The tide was flowing one way or another; that much was certain.