There had been only three of them left to carry on the wild tradition--Timothy, Nan's father, who feared neither man nor devil, but could wile a bird off a tree or a woman's heart from her keeping, and his two sisters, whose beauty had broken more hearts than their kindness could ever mend.

And not one of the three had escaped the temperamental heritage which Angele de Varincourt had grafted on to a parent stem of dare-devil, reckless English growth.
The McDermots of Tarn, on the other hand, traced their descent in a direct line from one of the unbending old Scotch Covenanters of 1638, and it had always been a source of vague bewilderment to Eliza that a race sprang from so staunchly Puritan a stock should have been juggled by that inimitable trickster, Fate, into allying itself with a family in whose veins ran the hot French blood of the Varincourts.
Perhaps old Dame Nature in her garnered wisdom could have explained the riddle.

Certain it was that no sooner had Andrew McDermot set eyes upon Gabrielle Davenant--sister to that Annabel whom Lord St.John had loved and married--than straightway the visions of his youth, in which he had pictured some staid and modest-seeming Scotswoman as his helpmeet, were swept away by an overwhelming Celtic passion of love and romance of which he had not dreamed that he could be possessed.
It was a meeting of extremes, and since Gabrielle had drooped and pined in the bleak northern castle where the lairds of Tarn had dwelt from time immemorial, McDermot laid even his ancestral home upon love's altar and, coming south, had bought Trevarthen Wood, a tree-girt, sheltered house no great distance from Mallow, though further inland.
But the change was made too late to accomplish its purpose of renewing Gabrielle's enfeebled health.

Almost imperceptibly, with slow and kindly footsteps, Death had drawn daily nearer, until at last, quite happily and like a little child that is tired of playing and only wants to rest, Gabrielle slipped out of the world and her place knew her no more.
After his wife's death, McDermot had returned to his old home in Scotland and had reassumed his duties there as laird of the district, and when, later on, Death struck again, this time leaving his sister Eliza a widow in none too affluent circumstances, he had presented her with his Cornish home, glad to be rid of a place so haunted by poignant memories.
In such wise had Mrs.McBain and Sandy come to dwell in Cornwall, and since this, their third summer there, had brought his adored Nan Davenant once more to Mallow Court on a lengthy visit, Sandy's cup of joy was filled to the brim.
Mrs.McBain regarded her offspring from much the same standpoint as does a hen the brood of enterprising ducklings which, owing to some stratagem on the part of the powers that be, have hatched out from the eggs upon which she has been conscientiously sitting in the fond belief that they were those of her own species.
Sandy was a source of perpetual surprise to his mother, and of not inconsiderable anxiety.

How she and the late Duncan McBain of entirely prosaic memory had contrived to produce more or less of a musical genius by way of offspring she had never been able to fathom.