It was one of the late-comers who gave me this leave; a man well on in years, grizzled and weather-beaten; a seasoned soldier by his look and garb.  Though his frayed shoulder-knot was only that of a captain of foot,’twas plain enough he ranked his comrade, and the knight as well.

“You say you’ve bagged this Captain Ireton?  Who may he be?  Surely not old Roger’s son?”

“The same,” said the baronet, shortly, and would be filling his glass again.  He could always drink more and feel it less than any sot I ever knew.

“But how the devil came he here?  The last I knew of him—­’twas some half-score years ago, though, come to think—­he was a lieutenant in the Royal Scots.”

Mine enemy nodded.  “So he was.  But afterward he cut the service and levanted to the Continent.”

The questioner fell into a muse; then he laughed and clapped his leg.

“Ecod!  I do remember now.  There was a damned good mess-room joke about him.  When he was in the Blues they used to say his solemn face would stop a merry-making.  Well, after he had been in Austria a while they told this on him; that his field-marshal had him listed for a majority, and so he was presented to the empress.  But when Maria Theresa saw him she shrieked and cried out, ’Il est le pere aux tetes rondes, lui-meme!  Le portez-vous dehors!’ So he got but a captaincy after all; ha! ha! ha!”

Now this was but a mess-room gibe, as he had said, cut out of unmarred cloth, at that.  Our Austrian Maria ever had a better word than “roundhead” for her soldiers.  But yet it stung, and stung the more because I had and have the Ireton face, and that is unbeloved of women, and glum and curst and solemn even when the man behind it would be kindly.  So when they laughed and chuckled at this jest, I lingered on and listened with the better grace.

“What brought him over-seas, Sir Francis?” ’Twas not the grizzled jester who asked, but the younger officer, his comrade.

Falconnet smiled as one who knows a thing and will not tell, and turned to Gilbert Stair.

“What was it, think you, Mr. Stair?” he said, passing the question on.

At this they all looked to the master of Appleby Hundred, and I looked, too.  He was not the man I should have hit upon in any throng as the reaver of my father’s estate; still less the man who might be Margery’s father.  He had the face of all the Stairs of Ballantrae without its simple Scottish ruggedness; a sort of weasel face it was, with pale-gray eyes that had a trick of shifty dodging, and deep-furrowed about the mouth and chin with lines that spoke of indecision.  It was not of him that Margery got her firm round chin, or her steadfast eyes that knew not how to quail, nor aught of anything she owed a father save only her paternity, you’d say.  And when he spoke the thin falsetto voice matched the weak chin to a hair.

“I?  Damme, Sir Francis, I know not why he came—­how should I know?” he quavered.  “Appleby Hundred is mine—­mine, I tell you!  His title was well hanged on a tree with his damned rebel father!”