CHAPTER I

  “The actors are at hand,
   And by their show
   You shall know all that you are like to know.”
     Midsummer Night’s Dream.

It was tea-time in Priorsford:  four-thirty by the clock on a chill October afternoon.

The hills circling the little town were shrouded with mist.  The wide bridge that spanned the Tweed and divided the town proper—­the Highgate, the Nethergate, the Eastgate—­from the residential part was almost deserted.  On the left bank of the river, Peel Tower loomed ghostly in the gathering dusk.  Round its grey walls still stood woods of larch and fir, and in front the links of Tweed moved through pleasant green pastures.  But where once ladies on palfreys hung with bells hunted with their cavaliers there now stood the neat little dwellings of prosperous, decent folk; and where the good King James wrote his rhymes, and listened to the singing of Mass from the Virgin’s Chapel, the Parish Kirk reared a sternly Presbyterian steeple.  No need any longer for Peel to light the beacon telling of the coming of our troublesome English neighbours.  Telegraph wires now carried the matter, and a large bus met them at the trains and conveyed them to that flamboyant pile in red stone, with its glorious views, its medicinal baths, and its band-enlivened meals, known as Priorsford Hydropathic.

As I have said, it was tea-time in Priorsford.

The schools had skailed, and the children, finding in the weather little encouragement to linger, had gone to their homes.  In the little houses down by the riverside brown teapots stood on the hobs, and rosy-faced women cut bread and buttered scones, and slapped their children with a fine impartiality; while in the big houses on the Hill, servants, walking delicately, laid out tempting tea-tables, and the solacing smell of hot toast filled the air.

Most of the smaller houses in Priorsford were very much of one pattern and all fairly recently built, but there was one old house, an odd little rough stone cottage, standing at the end of a row of villas, its back turned to its parvenu neighbours, its eyes lifted to the hills.  A flagged path led up to the front door through a herbaceous border, which now only held a few chrysanthemums and Michaelmas daisies (Perdita would have scorned them as flowers for the old age), but in spring and in summer blazed in a sweet disorder of old-fashioned blossoms.

This little house was called The Rigs.

It was a queer little house, and a queer little family lived in it.  Jardine was their name, and they sat together in their living-room on this October evening.  Generally they all talked at once and the loudest voice prevailed, but to-night there was not so much competition, and Jean frequently found herself holding the floor alone.

David, busy packing books into a wooden box, was the reason for the comparative quiet.  He was nineteen, and in the morning he was going to Oxford to begin his first term there.  He had so long looked forward to it that he felt dazed by the nearness of his goal.  He was a good-looking boy, with honest eyes and a firm mouth.