“I don’t want,” said he, “to seem to have gone daft on the subject of marriage, and I see no reason why you should be in any haste about it.  Certainly I should hate to lose you, my child, but—­Hartley as the next Lord Risdale is undoubtedly a good match.  And you say you like him.”

The girl looked up with a sort of defiance, and her face was a little flushed.

“I don’t love him,” she said.  “I like him immensely, but I don’t love him, and, after all—­well, you say I’m cold, and I admit I’m more or less ambitious, but, after all—­well, I just don’t quite love him.  I want to love the man I marry.”

Old David Stewart held up his black cigar and gazed thoughtfully at the smoke which streamed thin and blue and veil-like from its lighted end.

“Love!” he said, in a reflective tone.  “Love!” He repeated the word two or three times slowly, and he stirred a little in his bed.  “I have forgotten what it is,” said he.  “I expect I must be very old.  I have forgotten what love—­that sort of love—­is like.  It seems very far away to me and rather unimportant.  But I remember that I thought it important enough once, a century or two ago.  Do you know, it strikes me as rather odd that I have forgotten what love is like.  It strikes me as rather pathetic.”  He gave a sort of uncouth grimace and stuck the black cigar once more into his mouth.  “Egad!” said he, mumbling indistinctly over the cigar, “how foolish love seems when you look back at it across fifty or sixty years!”

Miss Benham rose to her feet smiling, and she came and stood near where the old man lay propped up against his pillows.  She touched his cheek with her cool hand, and old David put up one of his own hands and patted it.

“I’m going to bed now,” said she.  “I’ve sat here talking too long.  You ought to be asleep, and so ought I.”

“Perhaps!  Perhaps!” the old man said.  “I don’t feel sleepy, though.  I dare say I shall read a little.”  He held her hand in his and looked up at her.

“I’ve been talking a great deal of nonsense about marriage,” said he.  “Put it out of your head!  It’s all nonsense.  I don’t want you to marry for a long time.  I don’t want to lose you.”  His face twisted a little, quite suddenly.  “You’re precious near all I have left, now,” he said.

The girl did not answer at once, for it seemed to her that there was nothing to say.  She knew that her grandfather was thinking of the lost boy, and she knew what a bitter blow the thing had been to him.  She often thought that it would kill him before his old malady could run its course.

But after a moment she said, very gently:  “We won’t give up hope.  We’ll never give up hope.  Think! he might come home to-morrow!  Who knows?”

“If he has stayed away of his own accord,” cried out old David Stewart, in a loud voice, “I’ll never forgive him—­not if he comes to me to-morrow on his knees!  Not even if he comes to me on his knees!”