Chapter 11. We Shift our Base
That night after dinner we held a council of war, at which we all agreed that Peter John should be present. That was a comfort to him, for since Anna’s coming he had been rather left out of things. Sandy, as was his habit at Laverlaw, wore the faded green coat of a Border dining club, but it didn’t make him look, as it usually did, a Scots laird snug among his ancestral possessions. His face had got that special fining-down which I so well remembered, and his eyes that odd dancing light which meant that he was on the warpath again.
We had heard nothing of him for weeks, so I had a good many questions to ask.
‘What have I been doing?’ he said. ‘Going to and fro on the earth. Trying to get a line on various gentry. My old passion for queer company has stood m
