“I have seen it from the road,” answered the guest, arrested in his mental wanderings by the mention of his own age.

“You must have seen it often, living so close.”

“I never lived close myself; I am a Londoner.”

“It’s all the same—­your people do.  The Pennycuicks and the Careys have been neighbours for generations.”

“I am only distantly related to that family.”

“A Carey is a Carey,” persisted the old man, who had determined to have it so from the first, and he would listen to no disclaimers.

He had already referred darkly to that Mary Carey of the hooked nose and pointed chin.  His eldest daughter, he said, had been named after her.  This eldest daughter, with her too-ruddy face, had shyly drawn near, and taken a chair at her father’s elbow, where she sat very quietly, busily tatting.  Plain though her face was, she had beautiful hands.  Her play with thread and shuttle, just under Guthrie’s eyes, held them watchful for a time—­the time during which no sign of Deborah’s white gown was to be perceived upon the landscape.

“My brother and I, we never hit it off, somehow.  So when my father died I cleared.  You don’t remember his funeral, I suppose?  No, no—­that was before your time.  They hung the church all over with black broadcloth of the best.  That was the way in those days, and the cloth was the parson’s perquisite.  The funeral hangings used to keep him in coats and trousers.  And they used to deal out long silk hat-scarves to all the mourners—­silk that would stand alone, as they say—­and the wives made mantles and aprons of them.  They went down from mother to daughter, like the best china and family spoons.  That’s how women took care of their clothes when I was young.  They didn’t want new frocks and fallals every week, like some folks I could name.”  And he pinched his daughter’s ear.

“Talk to Deb, father,” said Mary.  “I have not had a new frock for a great many weeks.”

“Aye, Deb’s the one!  That girl’s got to marry a millionaire, or I don’t know where she’ll be.”

Almost Mrs Urquhart’s words!  And, like hers, they pricked sharply into the feelings of our young man.  His eyes went a-roaming once more, to discover the white gown afar off, trailing unheeded along a dusty garden path.  The old man saw it too, and his genial countenance clouded over.

“Well,” he continued, after a thoughtful pause, “poor old Billy Dalzell and I, we emigrated together.  He had a devil of a stepfather, and no home to speak of.  We were mates at school, and we made up our minds to start out for ourselves.  You remember the Dalzells of the Grange, of course?”

“I can’t say that I do, sir.”

“Well, they’re gone now.  Billy’s father went the pace, and the mortgagees sold him up; and if his mother hadn’t given him a bit when we started, Billy wouldn’t have had a penny.  She pawned all she could lay her hands on for him, we found out afterwards—­Billy was cut up about that—­and got ill-used by Heggarty for it when he found it out.  She was a fool, that woman.  Everybody could see what Heggarty was, except her.  Old Dalzell was a gentleman, anyhow, with all his faults.”