“Are there? Special preparations, do you mean, Louis?”
“Monsieur Valdez is, I understand, with your permission, Monsieur, intending to provide a few decorations for the _salon_. He tells me that he entertains to-night in honor of the arrival of his friend Monsieur Frost.” (Froost, he called it).
“Oh, all right! I’ll certainly lunch out, if it makes things easier for you, Louis.”
When he was gone, I opened my letters. Among them was one from Waldo, and another from Sir Paget, both of some length, touching the family arrangement which Waldo had suggested with regard to Cragsfoot. I decided to put them in my pocket and read them later—while I had my lunch. I had lain already overlong in bed, my thoughts busy with the events of the _partie carrée_ of last night.
WALDO’S was a business letter; any feelings that might be influencing the proposed transaction, any sentiment that might be involved—whether of Nina’s, of his own, of his father’s, or of mine—he appeared to consider as having been adequately indicated in our talk at Paris, and accorded them only one passing reference. He assumed that I should be bearing all that—he had a habit of describing the emotions as “all that,” I remembered—in mind; what remained was to ask me whether I were favorably disposed to the arrangement, the value of his remainder—which must, alas, before many years were out, become an estate in possession—to be fixed by a firm of land agents selected by himself and me—“from which price I should suggest deducting twenty-five per cent. in consideration of what I believe the lawyers call ‘natural love and affection’; in other words, because I’d much sooner sell to you than to a stranger—in fact, than to _anybody else_.” The underlining of the last two words clearly asked me to substitute for them a proper name with which we were both well acquainted. He added that he thought the land agents’ valuation would be somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty thousand pounds, timber included—and so, with kindest remembrances from Nina, who was splendidly fit, _considering_ (another underlining gave me news of possible importance for the future of the Dundrannan barony), he remained my affectionate cousin.
Though I suspect that son and father, at the bottom of their hearts, felt much the same about the matter, Sir Paget’s letter was expressed in a different vein. Leaving the business to Waldo, he dealt with the personal aspect: