So, dissembling my excitements and anxieties, I swung placidly in my hammock, and near by sat the beautiful youth with his thumb carried tenderly in a bandage.  In my preoccupied state of mind, to entertain him might have seemed by no means an idle pastime, if he hadn’t unexpectedly developed a talkative streak himself.  Was it merely my being so distrait, or was it quite another reason, that led him to open up so suddenly about his Kentish home?  Strange to say, instead of panting for the title, Cuthbert wanted his brother to go on living, though there was something queer about his spine, poor fellow, and the doctors said he couldn’t possibly—­ Of course I was surprised at Cuthbert’s views, for I had always thought that if there were a title in your family your sentiments toward those who kept you out of it were necessarily murderous, and your tears crocodile when you pretended to weep over their biers.  But Cuthbert’s feelings were so human that I mentally apologized to the nobility.  As to High Staunton Manor, I adored it.  It is mostly Jacobean, but with an ancient Tudor wing, and it has a chapel and a ghost and a secret staircase and a frightfully beautiful and wicked ancestress hanging in the hall—­I mean a portrait of her—­and quantities of oak paneling quite black with age, and silver that was hidden in the family tombs when Cromwell’s soldiers came, and a chamber where Elizabeth once slept, and other romantic details too numerous to mention.  It is all a little bit run down and shabby, for lack of money to keep it up, and of course on that account all the more entrancing.  Naturally the less money the more aristocracy, for it meant that the family had never descended to marrying coal miners and brewers—­which comment is my own, for Cuthbert was quite destitute of swank.

The present Lord Grasmere lived up to his position so completely that he had the gout and sat with his foot on a cushion exactly like all the elderly aristocrats you ever heard of, only when I inquired if his lordship cursed his valet and flung plates at the footmen when his foot hurt him his son was much shocked and pained.  He did not realize so well as I—­from an extensive course of novel-reading—­that such is the usual behavior of titled persons.

It was delightful, there in the hot stillness of the island, with the palms rustling faintly overhead, to hear of that cool, mossy, ancient place.  I asked eager questions—­I repeated gloatingly fragments of description—­I wondered enviously what it would be like to have anything so old and proud and beautiful in your very blood—­when suddenly I realized that, misled by my enthusiasm, Cuthbert was saying something which must not be said—­that he was about to offer the shelter of that ancient roof to me.  To me, whose heart could never nest there, but must be ever on the wing, a wild bird of passage in the track of a ship—­

I sat up with a galvanic start.  “Oh—­listen—­didn’t you hear something?” I desperately broke in.  For somehow I must stop him.  I didn’t want our nice jolly friendship spoiled—­and besides, fancy being cooped up on an island with a man you have refused!  Especially when all the while you’d be wanting so to pet and console him!