The latter part of this commentary was naturally not that of the pretender’s host and hostess.  In the throes of their anger and chagrin their one consoling reflection was that no friends less tried than Mr. and Mrs. Rentoul happened to be there to witness their confusion.  Yet other sufferers since Job have found that the oldest friends do not necessarily of er the most acceptable consolation.

“Oh, oh!  I feel like to die of grief!” wailed poor Mrs. Gallosh.

“Aye; it’s an awful smack in the eye for you,” said Mr. Rentoul sagely.

“Smack in the eye!” thundered his host.  “It’s a criminal offence—­that’s what it is!  It’s a damned swindle!  It’s a——­”

“Oh, hush, hush!” interrupted Mrs. Rentoul in a shocked voice.  “What words for a lady to hear!  After all, you must remember you never made any inquiries.”

“Inquiries!  What for should I be making inquiries about my guests?  You never dropped a word of such a thing!  Who’d have listened if I had?  It was just Lord Tulliwuddle this and Lord Tulliwuddle that from morning to night since ever he came to the Castle.”

“Duncan’s so simple-minded,” groaned Mrs. Gallosh.

“And what were you, I’d like to know?  What were you?” retorted her justly incensed spouse.  “Never a word did I hear, but just that he was such an aristocratic young man, and any one could see he had blue blood in his veins, and stuff of that kind!”

“I more than once had my own doubts about that,” said the alcohol expert with a knowing wink.  “There was something about him——­ Ah, well, he was not exactly my own idea of a lord.”

“Your idea?” scoffed his oldest and best of friends.  “What do you know of lords, I’d like to know?”

“Well, well,” answered the sage peaceably, “maybe we’ve neither of us had much opportunity of judging of the nobility.  It’s just more bad luck than anything else that you should have gone to the expense of setting up in style in a lord’s castle and then having this downcome.  If I’d had similar ambeetions it might have been me.”

This soft answer was so far from turning away wrath, that Mrs. Rentoul again felt compelled to stem the tide of her host’s eloquence.

“Oh, hush!” she exclaimed; “I’d have fancied you’d be having no thoughts beyond your daughter’s affliction.”

“My Eva! my poor Eva!  Where is the suffering child?” cried Mrs. Gallosh.  “Duncan, what’ll she be doing?”

“Making a to-do like the rest of the women-folk,” replied her husband, with rather less sympathy than the occasion seemed to demand.

In point of fact Eva had disappeared from the company immediately after hearing the contents of Mr. Maddison’s letter, and whatever she had been doing, it had not been weeping alone, for at that moment she ran into the room, her face agitated, but rather, it seemed, with excitement than grief.