“Oh dear, no!  I think he had been invalided home not more than two or three months when she married Connolly, of the Seventy-first Madras Infantry.  Then she ran away from him with some civilian fellow, and Connolly blew his brains out.  That,” said the major, honestly, “is always a puzzle to me.  How a fellow can be such an ass as to blow his brains out when his wife runs away from him beats my comprehension altogether.  Now what I would do would be this:  I would thank goodness I was rid of such a piece of baggage; I would get all the good-fellows I know, and give them a rattling fine dinner; and I would drink a bumper to her health and another bumper to her never coming back.”

“And I would send you our Donald, and he would play, ’Cha till mi tuilich’ for you,” Macleod said.

“But as for blowing my brains out!  Well,” the major added, with a philosophic air, “when a man is mad he cares neither for his own life nor for anybody else’s.  Look at those cases you continually see in the papers:  a young man is in love with a young woman; they quarrel, or she prefers some one else; what does he do but lay hold of her some evening and cut her throat—­to show his great love for her—­and then he coolly gives himself up to the police, and says he is quite content to be hanged.”

“Stuart,” said Macleod, laughing, “I don’t like this talk about hanging.  You said a minute or two ago that I was mad.”

“More or less,” observed the major, with absolute gravity; “as the lawyer said when he mentioned the Fifteen-acres park at Dublin.”

“Well, let us get into a hansom,” Macleod said.  “When I am hanged you will ask them to write over my tombstone that I never kept anybody waiting for either luncheon or dinner.”

The trim maid-servant who opened the door greeted Macleod with a pleasant smile; she was a sharp wench, and had discovered that lovers have lavish hands.  She showed the two visitors into the drawing-room; Macleod silent, and listening intently; the one-eyed major observing everything, and perhaps curious to know whether the house of an actress differed from that of anybody else.  He very speedily came to the conclusion that, in his small experience, he had never seen any house of its size so tastefully decorated and accurately managed as this simple home.

“But what’s this!” he cried, going to the mantelpiece and taking down a drawing that was somewhat ostentatiously placed there.  “Well!  If this is English hospitality!  By Jove! an insult to me, and my father, and my father’s clan, that blood alone will wipe out.  ’The Astonishment of Sandy MacAlister Mhor on beholding a Glimpse of Sunlight,’ Look!”

He showed the rude drawing to Macleod—­a sketch of a wild Highlander, with his hair on end, his eyes starting out of his head, and his hands uplifted in bewilderment.  This work of art was the production of Miss Carry, who, on hearing the knock at the door, had whipped into the room, placed her bit of savage satire over the mantelpiece, and whipped out again.  But her deadly malice so far failed of its purpose that, instead of inflicting any annoyance, it most effectually broke the embarrassment of Miss Gertrude’s entrance and introduction to the major.