“Then who—?”

“Gets it?  Miss Pennycuick.  She’s here now.  And couldn’t believe it when they told her—­though, when you come to think of it, it was a natural thing for him to do, having been such friends with the old man, and she his god-daughter.  A lucky young woman—­my word!” Jim’s swelled heart collapsed and sank like a burst balloon.  His dream-house vanished in thin air, to be built no more.

“That settles it,” he said to himself.  According to his code of manly honour and self-respect, a man could not possibly, even with five thousand pounds in hand, ask a girl with a quarter of a million to marry him.

A little more conversation, if it can be called such, when one talked and the other did not even listen, and he parted with the garrulous manager and rode on to the house.  Deb, wet-eyed, met him with a welcome that severely tried his Spartan fortitude, without in the least weakening his resolve.  Although she did not know it, being still filled with grief for her lifelong friend, it was the power and command that he had endowed her with which gave that charming air of fearless and open affection to her manner.

“Oh, my dear, dear boy!” she addressed him, and all but kissed him before his mother’s eyes.  “I am so glad to have you here.  Jim dear, Mrs Urquhart thinks you can be spared—­will you stay here for a bit and help me to settle things?  There is so much to do, and it is my duty to attend to everything myself.  There are the lawyers and people, of course—­everybody is so kind—­but I want a man of my own beside me.”

“Certainly, Deb,” he replied, without wincing; “for as long as you want me—­if I can run home every other day or so for a look round.”

He stayed, in company with his mother, for a month; then, when he went to live at home again, he spent at least half his days at Redford, acting as Deb’s ‘own man’ indoors and out—­her real legal adviser, her real station manager, her confidential major-domo, the doer of all the ‘dirty work’ connected with the administration of her estate; and never —­although she exposed him to almost every sort of temptation—­never once stepped off the line that he had marked for himself.

Another person was not so scrupulous, though, to be sure, he was not so poor.

Claud Dalzell, drifting from one resort of the wealthy to another—­ deer-stalking in Scotland, salmon-fishing in Norway, shooting in the Rockies, hunting in the Shires, yachting everywhere, and everywhere adored of a crowd of women as idle as himself—­was loafing at Monte Carlo when he heard of Mr Thornycroft’s death and Deb’s accession to his throne.  Ennui and satiety possessed the popular young man at the moment—­for he was made for better things, and his dissatisfied soul tormented him; and a vision of old-time Redford and the beautiful girl who was like wine and fire, a blend of passion and purity that now impressed him as unique, rose before his mental eyes with the effect of water-springs in