"Ah, to be sure—yes, to be sure! Sad thing!—sad thing! No fault of yours, though, Erceldoune. Your father shouldn't have been able to touch the entail. He was a Well, well! he's gone to his account now," said his Grace, pulling himself up short, with a perception that he was on dangerous ground, but continuing to gaze about him with a blank naïveté of astonishment. Men used to call him a "sexagenarian schoolboy;" it was too harsh, for the Duke was a thoroughly good man of business, and a manly and honest friend, but it was true that the simplicity and candour of boyhood clung very oddly to him, and a courtier or a fine gentleman his Grace of Glencairne had never become, though he was not without a frank dignity of his own when roused to it.
By an arched side-door, through a long corridor, they passed into a room in the southern and still habitable portion of the house; a long lofty room, lighted at the end with two magnificent painted windows, panelled with cedar picked out with gold, hung with some half-dozen rare pictures, a Titian, two Watteaux, a Teniers, a Van Tol, and a Memling, covered with a once rich crimson carpeting, now much worn, and with some gold and silver racing and hunting cups on the buffet. The chamber was the
