Well,"
struggling with his ill-humour, "what have you been doing with
yourself since you left Staplegrove? You look rather seedy and a bit
pale about the gills--do you and the giant smoke too much?"
"Oh, I am well enough," replied Malcolm hurriedly. "If we come to
that, you have rather a weedy appearance yourself;" for Cedric
looked decidedly thinner, and his eyes were almost unnaturally
bright. He seemed older, too, and changed in some undefinable way;
but he had never looked handsomer. Malcolm forgot his own troubles
in his anxiety to prevent his protege falling into the hands of the
adventurer, Saul Jacobi. For the moment his own soul seemed to yearn
over the boy who was his sisters' darling and the object of their
thoughts and prayers.
"Look here, old fellow," he went on, as Cedric seemed relapsing into
moody silence, "there is no use beating about the bush. I have come
down to-night to have a talk with you, because a report has reached
my ears. Is it true that you have been mad enough to engage yourself
to the lady calling herself Miss Jacobi?" Then Cedric flushed up,
and his eyes blazed with anger.
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