When dinner was over, and he had finished his cigar which he smoked in the presence of Bessie, she asked him of the American, who was coming the next evening.

“Oh, yes, Grey Jerrold,” Neil said, “and the finest specimen of a Yankee you ever saw.”

“I don’t believe I like Yankees,” Bessie said curtly, and Neil replied: 

“You will like this one; you cannot help it, every body likes him, from the shabbiest old woman in the railway carriage to the prettiest girl in Piccadilly.  Perhaps it was a liberty I ought not to have taken, inviting him here without consulting you first, but I wanted you to see him, and him to see you,” and there was a vehemence in Neil’s voice and manner which Bessie could not understand.  “He is rich, or will be by and by,” Neil said.  “And the most generous chap I ever saw.  He was always helping us out of scrapes at school.  He has a rich aunt in America, who keeps him well supplied with money, besides what his father gave him when he came of age.”

“What did you say he was doing in Carnarvon?” Bessie asked, and Neil replied: 

“Hunting up some old woman, or young woman, I don’t know which, as I never paid much attention to what he did say about it, I believe, though, there is some money in the case.  I wish it was for me,” Neil said, and then suddenly he sank into a thoughtful, abstracted mood, from which he did not rouse till the clock struck ten and it was time to say good-night.  “I have not been very good company for the last hour, I have been worried lately and am not quite myself,” he said to Bessie, when she asked if he were ill and if there was anything she could do for him or send to his room.

And Neil had been worried and exasperated and wrought upon until he was half beside himself.  His mother had wished him to accompany her and Blanche to the house of a friend near Edinburgh, and when he refused, saying he preferred to go to Stoneleigh, there had been a jolly row, as he expressed it, and his mother had charged him with his preference for the daughter of that bold adventuress, and had told him decidedly that if he ever dared to marry her he should never touch a shilling of her money either during her life-time or after, for once assured of the marriage she would so arrange her matters that he would be as great a beggar as Archie McPherson himself.

“A family of paupers!” she said, scornfully.  “Your father has nothing to give you; absolutely nothing, and you can yourself judge, how, with your tastes and habits, you will like living at Stoneleigh with two meals a day, as I hear they sometimes do, blacking your own boots and building your own fires.”