Merton conceived that the wits of his visitor were worse than ’wool gathering,’ that he had ‘softening of the brain.’  But circumstances presently indicated that Lord Restalrig was actually suffering from a much less common disorder—­softening of the heart.

He returned to his seat, and helped himself to snuff out of the enamelled gold box, on which Merton deemed it politic to keep a watchful eye.

‘Man, I’m sweir’ (reluctant) ‘to come to the point,’ said Lord Restalrig.

Merton erroneously understood him to mean that he was under oath or vow to come to the point, and showed a face of attention.

’I’m not the man I was.  The doctors don’t understand my case—­they take awful fees—­but I see they think ill of it.  And that sets a body thinking.  Have you a taste of brandy in the house?’

As the visitor’s weather-beaten ruddiness had changed to a ghastly ashen hue, rather bordering on the azure, Merton set forth the liqueur case, and drew a bottle of soda water.

‘No water,’ said the peer; ‘it’s just ma twal’ ours, an auld Scotch fashion,’ and he took without winking an orthodox dram of brandy.  Then he looked at the silver tops of the flasks.

‘A good coat!’ he said.  ‘Yours?’

Merton nodded.

’Ye quarter the Douglas Heart.  A good coat.  Dod, I’ll speak plain.  The name, Mr. Merton, when ye come to the end o’ the furrow, the name is all ye have left.  We brought nothing into the world but the name, we take out nothing else.  A sore dispensation.  I’m not the man I was, not this two years.  I must dispone, I know it well.  Now the name, that I thought that I cared not an empty whistle for, is worn to a rag, but I cannot leave it in the mire.  There’s just one that bears it, one Logan by name, and true Logan by the mother’s blood.  The mother’s mother, my cousin, was a bonny lass.’

He paused; his enfeebled memory was wandering, no doubt, in scenes more vivid to him than those of yesterday.

Merton was now attentive indeed.  The miserly marquis had become, to him, something other than a curious survival of times past.  There was a chance for Logan, his friend, the last of the name, but Logan was firmly affianced to Miss Markham, of the cloak department at Madame Claudine’s.  And the marquis, as he said, ‘had come about stopping a marriage,’ and Merton was to help him in stopping it, in disentangling Logan!

The old man aroused himself.  ’I have never seen the lad but once, when he was a bairn.  But I’ve kept eyes on him.  He has nothing, and since I came to London I hear that he has gone gyte, I mean—­ye’ll not understand me—­he is plighted to a long-legged shop-lass, the daughter of a ne’er-do-well Australian land-louper, a doctor.  This must not be.  Now I’ll speak plain to you, plainer than to Tod and Brock, my doers—­ye call them lawyers. They did not make my will.’

Merton prevented himself, by an effort, from gasping.  He kept a countenance of cold attention.  But the marquis was coming to the point.