The youth started.  His eyes had been fixed on a woman sitting beside the fire, with her hand in a man’s.  It was such an attitude as sophisticated lovers would only assume in private but the pair were not sophisticated and lovers still, though married.  They lacked self-consciousness, and the husband liked to feel his wife’s hand in his.  After all, a thing impossible until you are married may be quite seemly afterwards, and none of their amiable elders regarded their devotion with cynicism.

“All right, uncle!” said Henry Lennox.

He rose—­a big fellow with heavy shoulders, a clean-shaven, youthful face, and flaxen hair.  He had been handsome, save for a nose with a broken bridge, but his pale brown eyes were fine, and his firm mouth and chin well modelled.  Imagination and reflection marked his countenance.

Sir Walter claimed thirty points on his scoring board, and gave a miss with the spot ball.

“I win to-night,” he said.

He was a small, very upright man, with a face that seemed to belong to his generation, and an expression seldom to be seen on a man younger than seventy.  Life had not puzzled him; his moderate intellect had taken it as he found it, and, through the magic glasses of good health, good temper, and great wealth, judged existence a desirable thing and quite easy to conduct with credit.  “You only want patience and a brain,” he always declared.  Sir Walter wore an eyeglass.  He was growing bald, but preserved a pair of grey whiskers still of respectable size.  His face, indeed, belied him, for it was moulded in a stern pattern.  One had guessed him a martinet until his amiable opinions and easy-going personality were manifested.  The old man was not vain; he knew that a world very different from his own extended round about him.  But he was puzzle-headed, and had never been shaken from his life-long complacency by circumstances.  He had been disappointed in love as a young man, and only married late in life.  He had no son, and was a widower—­facts that, to his mind, quite dwarfed his good fortune in every other respect.  He held the comfortable doctrine that things are always levelled up, and he honestly believed that he had suffered as much sorrow and disappointment as any Lennox in the history of the race.

His only child and her cousin, Henry Lennox, had been brought up together and were of an age—­both now twenty-six.  The lad was his uncle’s heir, and would succeed to Chadlands and the title; and it had been Sir Walter’s hope that he and Mary might marry.  Nor had the youth any objection to such a plan.  Indeed, he loved Mary well enough; there was even thought to be a tacit understanding between them, and they grew up in a friendship which gradually became ardent on the man’s part, though it never ripened upon hers.  But she knew that her father keenly desired this marriage, and supposed that it would happen some day.