It was a trying position in which Olivia found herself when first she sat at the same table with the stranger whose sense of humour, as she must always think, was bound to be vastly entertained by her ridiculous story. Yet she carried off the situation with that triumph that ever awaits on a frank eye, a good honest heart, and an unfailing trust in the ultimate sympathy of one's fellow-creatures. There was no mauvaise honte there, Count Victor saw, and more than ever he admired, if that were possible. It was the cruel father of the piece who was uneasy. He it was who must busy himself with the feeding of an appetite whose like he had not manifested before, either silent altogether or joining in the conversation with the briefest sentences.

There was never a Montaiglon who would lose such a good occasion, and Count Victor made the most of it. He was gentle, but not too gentle—for this was a lady to resent the easy self-effacement with which so many of her sex are deceived and flattered; he was not unmindful of the more honest compliments, yet he had the shrewdness to eschew the mere meaningless blague that no one could better employ with the creatures of Versailles, who liked their olives well oiled, or the Jeannetons and Mimis of the Italian comedy and the playhouse. Under his genial and shining influence Olivia soon forgot the ignominy of these recent days, and it was something gained in that direction that already she looked upon him as a confederate.

“I am so glad you like our country, Count Victor,” she said, no way dubious about his praise of her home hills, those loud impetuous cataracts, and that alluring coast. “It rains—oh! it rains—”

“Parfaitement, mademoiselle, but when it shines!” and up went his hands in an admiration wherefor words were too little eloquent: at that moment he was convinced truly that the sun shone nowhere else than in the Scottish hills.

“Yes, yes, when it shines, as you say, it is the dear land! Then the woods—the woods gleam and tremble, I always think, like a girl who has tears in her eyes, the tears of gladness. The hills—let my father tell you of the hills, Count Victor; I think he must love them more than he loves his own Olivia—is that not cruel of a man with an only child? He would die, I am sure, if he could not be seeing them when he liked. But I cannot be considering the hills so beautiful as my own glens, my own little glens, that no one, I'll be fancying, is acquainted with to the heart but me and the red deer, and maybe a hunter or two. Of course, we have the big glens, too, and I would like it if I could show you Shira Glen—”

“The best of it was once our own,” said Doom, black at brow.

“—That once was ours, as father says, and is mine yet so long as I can walk there and be thinking my own thoughts in it when the wood is green, and the wild ducks are plashing in the lake.”

Doom gave a significant exclamation: he was recalling that rumour had Shira Glen for his daughter's favourite trysting-place.

“Rain or shine,” said Count Victor, delighting in such whole-souled rapture, delighting in that bright, unwearied eye, that curious turn of phrase that made her in English half a foreigner like himself—“Rain or shine, it is a country of many charms.”

“But now you are too large in your praise,” she said, not quite so warmly. “I do not expect you to think it is a perfect country-side at any time and all times; and it is but natural that you should love the country of France, that I have been told is a brave and beautiful country, and a country I am sometimes loving myself because of its hospitality to folk that we know. I know it is a country of brave men, and sometimes I am wondering if it is the same for beautiful women. Tell me!” and she leaned on an arm that shone warm, soft, and thrilling from the short sleeve of her gown, and put the sweetest of chins upon a hand for the wringing of hearts.

Montaiglon looked into those eyes, so frank and yet profound, and straight became a rebel. “Mademoiselle Olivia,” said he, indifferently (oh, Cecile! oh, Cecile!), “they are considered not unpleasing; but for myself, perhaps acquaintance has spoiled the illusion.”

She did not like that at all; her eyes grew proud and unbelieving.

“When I was speaking of the brave men of France,” said she, “I fancied perhaps they would tell what they really thought—even to a woman.” And he felt very much ashamed of himself.

“Ah! well, to tell the truth, mademoiselle,” he confessed, “I have known very beautiful ones among them, and many that I liked, and still must think of with affection. Mort de ma vie! am I not the very slave of your sex, that for all the charms, the goodness, the kindnesses and purities, is a continual reproach to mine? In the least perfect of them I have never failed to find something to remind me of my little mother.”

“And now I think that is much better,” said Olivia, heartily, her eyes sparkling at that concluding filial note. “I would not care at all for a man to come from his own land and pretend to me that he had no mind for the beautiful women and the good women he had seen there. No; it would not deceive me, that; it would not give me any pleasure. We have a proverb in the Highlands, that Annapla will often be saying, that the rook thinks the pigeon hen would be bonny if her wings were black; and that is a seanfhacal—that is an old-word that is true.”

“If I seemed to forget France and what I have seen there of Youth and Beauty,” said Count Victor, “it is, I swear it is—it is—”

“It is because you would be pleasant to a simple Highland girl,” said Olivia, with just a hint of laughter in her eyes.

“No, no, par ma foi! not wholly that. But yes, I love my country—ah! the happy days I have known there, the sunny weather, the friends so good, the comradeship so true. Your land is beautiful—it is even more beautiful than the exiles in Paris told me; but I was not born here, and there are times when your mountains seem to crush my heart.”

“Is it so, indeed?” said Doom. “As for me, I would not change the bleakest of them for the province of Champagne.” And he beat an impulsive hand upon the table.

“Yes, yes, I understand that,” cried Olivia. “I understand it very well. It is the sorrow of the hills and woods you mean; ah! do I not know it, too? It is only in my own little wee glens among the rowans that I can feel careless like the birds, and sing; when I walk the woods or stand upon the shore and see the hills without a tree or tenant, when the land is white with the snow and the mist is trailing, Olivia Lamond is not very cheery. What it is I do not know—that influence of my country; it is sad, but it is good and wholesome, I can tell you; it is then I think that the bards make songs, and those who are not bards, like poor myself, must just be feeling the songs there are no words for.”

At this did Doom sit mighty pleased and humming to himself a bar of minstrelsy.

“Look at my father there!” said Olivia; “he would like you to be thinking that he does not care a great deal for the Highlands of Scotland.”

“Indeed, and that is not fair, Olivia; I never made pretence of that,” said Doom. “Never to such as understand; Montaiglon knows the Highlands are at my heart, and that the look of the hills is my evening prayer.”

“Isn't that a father, Count Victor?” cried Olivia, quite proud of the confession. “But he is the strange father, too, that will be pretending that he has forgotten the old times and the old customs of our dear people. We are the children of the hills and of the mists; the hills make no change, the mists are always coming back, and the deer is in the corrie yet, and when you will hear one that is of the Highland blood say he does not care any more for the old times, and preferring the English tongue to his own, and making a boast of his patience when the Government of England robs him of his plaid, you must be watchful of that man, Count Victor. For there is something wrong. Is it not true, that I am saying, father?” She turned a questioning gaze to Doom, who had no answer but a sigh.

“You will have perhaps heard my father miscall the breacan, miscall the tartan, and—”

“Not at all,” cried the Baron. “There is a great difference between condemning and showing an indifference.”

“I think, father,” said Olivia, “we are among friends. Count Victor, as you say, could understand about our fancies for the hills, and it would be droll indeed if he smiled at us for making a treasure of the tartan. Whatever my father, the stupid man, the darling, may be telling you of the tartan and the sword, Count Victor, do not believe that we are such poor souls as to forget them. Though we must be wearing the Saxon in our clothes and in our speech, there are many like me—and my dear father there—who will not forget.”

It was a curious speech all that, not without a problem, as well as the charm of the unexpected and the novel, to Count Victor. For, somehow or other, there seemed to be an under meaning in the words; Olivia was engaged upon the womanly task—he thought—of lecturing some one. If he had any doubt about that, there was Mungo behind the Baron's chair, his face just showing over his shoulder, seamed with smiles that spoke of some common understanding between him and the daughter of his master; and once, when she thrust more directly at her father, the little servitor deliberately winked to the back of his master's head—a very gnome of slyness.

“But you have not told me about the ladies of France,” said she. “Stay! you will be telling me that again; it is not likely my father would be caring to hear about them so much as about the folk we know that have gone there from Scotland. They are telling me that many good, brave men are there wearing their hearts out, and that is the sore enough trial.”

Count Victor thought of Barisdale and his cousin-german, young Glengarry, gambling in that frowsiest boozing-ken in the Rue Tarane—the CafÉ de la Paix—without credit for a louis d'or; he thought of James Mor Drummond and the day he came to him behind the Tuileries stable clad in rags of tartan to beg a loan; none of these was the picturesque figure of loyalty in exile that he should care to paint for this young woman.

But he remembered also Cameron, Macleod, Traquair, a score of gallant hearts, of handsome gentlemen, and Lochiel, true chevalier—perhaps a better than his king!

It was of these Count Victor spoke—of their faith, their valiancies, their shifts of penury and pride. He had used often to consort with them at Cammercy, and later on in Paris. If the truth were to be told, they had made a man of him, and now he was generous enough to confess it.

“I owe them much, your exiles, Mademoiselle Olivia,” said he. “When first I met with them I was a man without an ideal or a name, without a scrap of faith or a cause to quarrel for. It is not good for the young, that, Baron, is it? To be passing the days in an ennui and the nights below the lamps? Well, I met your Scots after Dettingen, renewed the old acquaintance I had made at Cam-mercy, and found the later exiles better than the first—than the Balhaldies, the Glengarries, Mur-rays, and Sullivans. They were different, ces gens-lÀ. Ordinarily they rendezvoused in the Taverne Tourtel of St. Germains, and that gloomy palace shared their devotions with Scotland, whence they came and of which they were eternally talking, like men in a nostalgia. James and his Jacquette were within these walls, often indifferent enough, I fear, about the cause our friends were exiled there for; and Charles, between Luneville and Liege or Poland and London, was not at the time an inspiring object of veneration, if you will permit me to says so, M. le Baron. But what does it matter? the cause was there, an image to keep the good hearts strong, unselfish, and expectant. Ah! the songs they sang, so full of that hopeful melancholy of the glens you speak of, mademoiselle; the stories they told of Tearlach's Year; the hopes that bound them in a brotherhood—and binds them yet, praise le bon Dieu! That was good for me. Yes; I like your exiled compatriots very much, Mademoiselle Olivia. And yet there was a maraud or two among them; no fate could be too hard for the spies who would betray them.”

For the first time in many hours Count Victor remembered that he had an object in Scotland, but with it somehow Cecile was not associated.

“Mungo has been telling me about the spy, Count Victor. Oh, the wickedness of it! I feel black, burning shame that one with a Highland name and a Highland mother would take a part like yon. I would not think there could be men in the world so bad. They must have wicked mothers to make such sons; the ghost of a good mother would cry from her grave to check her child in such a villany.” Olivia spoke with intense feeling, her eyes lambent and her lips quivering.

“Drimdarroch's mother must have been a rock,” said Count Victor.

“And to take what was my father's name!” cried Olivia; “Mungo has been telling me that. Though I am a woman, I could be killing him myself.”

“And here we're in our flights, sure enough!” broke in the father, as he left them with a humorousous pretence at terror.

“Now you must tell me about the women of France,” said Olivia. “I have a friend who was there once, and tells me, like you, he was indifferent; but I am doubting that he must have seen some there that were worth his fancy.”

“Is it there sits the wind?” thought Montaiglon. “Our serene angel is not immune against the customary passions.” An unreasonable envy of the diplomatist who had been indifferent to the ladies of France took possession of him; still, he might have gratified her curiosity about his fair compatriots had not Doom returned, and then Olivia's interest in the subject oddly ceased.