Miss Cheyne of Essilmont, Volume 1

'Devilled kidneys, actually,' said Sir Ranald, in high good-humour, next morning at breakfast. 'I thought the anatomy of our butcher's shop seemed never to include kidneys.'

Alison was officiating at the tea-board in her plain but pretty morning-dress, and was thinking smilingly of the _tête-à-tête_ in the twilighted garden the evening before, when Archie laid some letters before her father, who glanced at them nervously. All that were in blue envelopes he knew instinctively to be duns, and thrust aside unopened. One in a square cover, that had thereon the initial C. surmounted by a coronet, he knew to be from Lord Cadbury, and opened, and read more than once, with a pleased, yet perplexed face, his brows knitted, yet his lips and eyes smiling.