Chapter 12 THE SECOND ACT.

Colonel Ferrers was taking his afternoon stroll in the garden. Dinner was over; for at Roseholme, as at Braeside, country hours were kept, with early dinner, and seven o'clock tea, the pleasantest of all meals.

With a fragrant Manilla cigar between his lips, and his good stick in his hand, the Colonel paced up and down the well-kept gravel paths