Lady McIntyre protested, but Sir William indorsed the news. Like the khaki aprons, a "temporary measure." Miss Nan made her accounting.
"All these horrid little scraps of paper!" Lady McIntyre complained.
"You can always change them for gold," Neil said.
"If you do, you must keep it circulating," warned Sir William. "No hoarding of gold!"
"But we can't get any more--that's just the trouble."
"You ought to have asked Miss Nan," said Madge.
"Why, I saw _piles_ of gold on your table when I went up to the inn with Miss Greta's note yesterday!"
"Yes; I'd got it out for her--all I had."
Miss von Schwarzenberg was leaning against the back of the settle. "What a pity!" she said quietly. "I wish I'd known you wanted gold."
"Did you? I couldn't have taken it in. It's gone now. To a poor person in desperate straits--A stranded American. That was why I borrowed it."
"Bor-_ch_-rowed it," she said, with the vanishing "ch" like a ghost of the final sound in the Scots word "loch."
Captain Colin was looking at her from under his thick, whitey-yellow eyebrows--in spite of the fact that his father was talking to him very earnestly about the tactics of the German Army. Beyond a doubt, consciousness of Miss Greta's foreignness was growing. Her slight burring of the "r" had never sounded so marked as it did to-day. For all her long residence in the States, Miss Greta was far more German than anybody in the Kirklamont circle had quite realized until the war. And now very plainly this "Germanism" was taking its place as a bar to conversation, a something still not productive of hostility so much as of _gêne_.
"I'd be so grateful, my dear," Lady McIntyre said half aside to Nan, "if you'd make Greta bathe her temples and lie down."
"Yes, let us go. All this--" Nan looked round the hall through a sudden bewilderment of compunction which fell like a veil over her brightness--"all this is dreadful for you."
"For me! Oh, no!"--Miss Greta held her head higher than ever--"it's not dreadful for _me_." She smiled a little fiercely,--to Napier's sense--as she left the hall, Madge on one side and Nan on the other.
When Sir William went off with his three sons for a stroll, Lady McIntyre accompanied them as far as the gate.