Accordingly she rang the bell, and told the maid to bring in the soup in five minutes and to lay another place.  Then turning to Harold she began to apologise to him.

“I don’t know what sort of dinner you will get, Colonel Quaritch,” she said; “it is so provoking of my father; he never gives one the least warning when he is going to ask any one to dinner.”

“Not at all—­not at all,” he answered hurriedly.  “It is I who ought to apologise, coming down on you like—­like——­”

“A wolf on the fold,” suggested Ida.

“Yes, exactly,” he went on earnestly, looking at his coat, “but not in purple and gold.”

“Well,” she went on laughing, “you will get very little to eat for your pains, and I know that soldiers always like good dinners.”

“How do you know that, Miss de la Molle?”

“Oh, because of poor James and his friends whom he used to bring here.  By the way, Colonel Quaritch,” she went on with a sudden softening of the voice, “you have been in Egypt, I know, because I have so often seen your name in the papers; did you ever meet my brother there?”

“I knew him slightly,” he answered.  “Only very slightly.  I did not know that he was your brother, or indeed that you had a brother.  He was a dashing officer.”

What he did not say, however, was that he also knew him to have been one of the wildest and most extravagant young men in an extravagant regiment, and as such had to some extent shunned his society on the few occasions that he had been thrown in with him.  Perhaps Ida, with a woman’s quickness, divined from his tone that there was something behind his remark—­at any rate she did not ask him for particulars of their slight acquaintance.

“He was my only brother,” she continued; “there never were but we two, and of course his loss was a great blow to me.  My father cannot get over it at all, although——­” and she broke off suddenly, and rested her head upon her hand.

At this moment the Squire was heard advancing down the stairs, shouting to the servants as he came.

“A thousand pardons, my dear, a thousand pardons,” he said as he entered the room, “but, well, if you will forgive particulars, I was quite unable to discover the whereabouts of a certain necessary portion of the male attire.  Now, Colonel Quaritch, will you take my daughter?  Stop, you don’t know the way—­perhaps I had better show you with the candle.”

Accordingly he advanced out of the vestibule, and turning to the left, led the way down a long passage till he reached the dining-room.  This apartment was like the vestibule, oak-panelled, but the walls were decorated with family and other portraits, including a very curious painting of the Castle itself, as it was before its destruction in the time of Cromwell.  This painting was executed on a massive slab of oak, and conceived in a most quaint and formal style, being relieved in the foreground with stags at gaze and