“I hope it may be many a long day before I’m anything else,” said he.

“Your uncle is an old man,” she suggestively threw out.

“Oh, not so very old,” he submitted.  “Only seventy, or thereabouts, and younger in many respects than I am.  I hope he’ll live for ever.”

“Hum!” said she, and appeared to fall a-musing.  Absently, as it seemed, and slowly, she was pulling off her gloves.

“Feuds in families,” she said, in a minute, “are bad things.  Why don’t you make it up?”

The young man waved his hand, a pantomimic non-possumus.

“There’s no one left to make it up with—­the others are all dead.”

“Oh?” she wondered, her eyebrows elevated, whilst automatically her fingers continued to operate upon her gloves.  “I thought the last lord left a widow.  I seem to have heard of a Lady Blanchemain somewhere.”

The young man gave still another of his little laughs.

“Linda Lady Blanchemain?” he said.  “Yes, one hears a lot of her.  A highly original character, by all accounts.  One hears of her everywhere.”

Linda Lady Blanchemain’s lip began to quiver; but she got it under control.

“Well?” she questioned—­eyes fixing his, and brimming with a kind of humorous defiance, as if to say, “Think me an impertinent old meddler if you will, and do your worst,”—­“Why don’t you make it up with her?”

But he didn’t seem to mind the meddling in the least.  He stood at ease, and plausibly put his case.

“Why don’t I?  Or why doesn’t my uncle?  My uncle is a temperamental conservative, a devotee to his traditions—­the sort of man who will never do anything that hasn’t been the constant habit of his forebears.  He would no more dream of healing a well-established family feud than of selling the family plate.  And I—­well, surely, it would never be for me to make the advances.”

“No, you’re right,” acknowledged Lady Blanchemain.  “The advances should come from her.  But people have such a fatal way—­even without being temperamental conservatives—­of leaving things as they find them.  Besides, never having seen you, she couldn’t know how nice you are.  All the same, I’ll confess, if you insist upon it, that she ought to be ashamed of herself.  Come—­let’s make it up.”

She rose, a great soft glowing vision of benignancy, and held out her hand, now gloveless, her pretty little smooth plump right hand, with its twinkling rings.

“Oh!” cried the astonished young man, the astonished, amused, moved, wondering, and entirely won young man, his sea-blue eyes wide open, and a hundred lights of pleasure and surprise dancing in them.

The benignant vision floated towards him, and he took the little white hand in his long lean brown one.

VIII

When the first stress of their emotion had in some degree spent itself Lady Blanchemain, returning to her place on the ottoman, bade John sit down beside her.