He spoke a little abstractedly, for he saw a delicate situation approaching. He was sure to be askedonce Annapla's service was over-what led to the encounter, and to give the whole story frankly involved Olivia's name unpleasantly in a vulgar squabble. He saw for the first time that he had been wholly unwarranted in taking the defence of the Baron's interests into his own hands. Could he boldly intimate that in his opinion jealousy of himself had been the spring of the Chamberlain's midnight attacks on the castle of Doom? That were preposterous! And yet that seemed the only grounds that would justify his challenging the Chamberlain.

When Annapla was gone then Doom got the baldest of histories. He was encouraged to believe that all this busy day of adventure had been due to a simple quarrel after a game of cards, and where he should have preferred a little more detail he had to content himself with a humorous narrative of the escape, the borrowing of the coat, and the interview with the Duchess.

"And now with your permission, Baron, I shall go to bed," at last said Count Victor. "I shall sleep to-night like a sabot. I am, I know, the boldest of beggars for your grace and kindness. It seems I am fated in this country to make free, not only with my enemy's coat, but with my dear friend's domicile as if it were an inn. To-morrow, Baron, I shall make my dispositions. The coat can be returned to its owner none the worse for my use of it, but I shall not so easily be able to square accounts with you."

271

CHAPTER XXXIV.

IN DAYS OF STORM.

IN a rigorous privacy of storm that lasted many days after his return, and cut Doom wholly off from the world at large, Count Victor spent what but for several considerations would have been-perhaps indeed they really were-among the happiest moments of his life. It was good in that tumultuous weather, when tempests snarled and frosts fettered the country-side, and the sea continually wrangled round the rock of Doom, to look out on the inclemency from windows where Olivia looked out too. She used to come and stand beside him, timidly perhaps at first, but by-and-by with no self-consciousness. Her sleeve would touch his, sometimes indeed her shoulder must press against his arm and little strands of her hair almost blow against his lips, as in the narrow apertures of the tower they watched the wheeling birds from the outer ocean. For these birds she had what was little less than a passion. To her they represented the unlimited world of liberty and endeavour; at sight of them something stirred in her that was the gift of all the wandering years of that old Ulysses, her grandfather, to whom the beckoning lights of ships at sea were irresistible; and though she doted on the glens of her nativity, she had the spirit that invests every hint of distant places and far-off happenings with magic parts.

She seemed content, and yet not wholly happy : he could hear her sometimes sigh, as he thought, from a mere wistfulness that had the illimitable spaces of the sea, the peopled isles and all their mystery, for background. To many of the birds that beat and cried about the place she gave names, investing them with histories, recounting humorously their careers. And it was odd that however far she sent them in her fancy-to the distant Ind, to the vexed Pole itself-with joy in their travelling, she assumed that their greatest joy was when they found themselves at Doom. The world was a place to fare forth in as far as you could, only to give you the better zest for Doom on your return.

This pleased her father hugely, but it scarcely tallied with the views of one who had fond memories of a land where sang the nightingale in its season, and roads were traversable in the wildest winter weather: still Count Victor was in no mood to question it.

He was, save in rare moments of unpleasant reflection, supremely happy, thrilling to that accidental contact, paling at the narrow margins whereby her hair escaped conferring on him a delirium. He could stand at a window all day pretending interest in the monotonous hills and empty sea, only that he might keep her there too and indulge himself upon her eyes. They-so eager, deep, or busied with the matters of her thoughts-were enough for a common happiness; a debauch of it was in the contact of her

arm.

And yet something in this complacence of hers bewildered him. Here, if you please, was a woman who but the other night (as it were) was holding clandestine meetings with Simon MacTaggart, and loving him to that extent that she defied her father. She could not but know that this foreigner had done his worst to injure her in the inner place of her affections, and yet she was to him more friendly than she had been before. Several times he was on the point

of speaking on the subject. Once, indeed, he made a playful allusion to the flautist of the bower that was provocative of no more than a reddened cheek and an interlude of silence. But tacitly the lover was a theme for strict avoidance. Not even the Baron had a word to say on that, and they were numberless the topics they discussed in this enforced sweet domesticity.

A curious household! How it found provisions in these days Mungo alone could tell. The little man had his fishing-lines out continually, his gun was to be heard in neighbouring thickets that seemed from the island inaccessible, and when gun and line failed him it was perhaps not wholly wanting his persuasion that kain fowls came from the hamlet expressly for "her ladyship" Olivia. In pauses of the wind he and Annapla were to be heard in other quarters of the house in clamant conversationotherwise it had seemed to Count Victor that Doom was left, an enchanted castle, to him and Olivia. alone. For the father relapsed anew into his old. strange melancholies, dozing over his books, indulging feint and riposte in the chapel overhead, or gazing moodily along the imprisoned coast. That he was free to dress now as he chose in his beloved tartan entertained him only briefly; obviously half the joy of his former recreations in the chapel had been due to the fact that they were clandestine: now that he could wear what he chose indoors, he pined that he could not go into the deer-haunted woods and the snowy highways in the breacan as of old. But that was not his only distress, Count Victor was

sure.

"What accounts for your father's melancholy?” he had the boldness one day to ask Olivia.

They were at the window together, amused at the figure Mungo presented, as, with an odd travesty of the soldier's strategy, and all unseen as he fancied, he chased a fowl round the narrow confines of the garden bent upon its slaughter.

S

"And you do not know the reason for that?" she asked, with her humour promptly clouded, and a loving and pathetic glance over her shoulder at the figure bent beside the fire. "What is the dearest thing to you?"

She could have put no more embarrassing question to Count Victor, and it was no wonder he stammered in his reply.

"The dearest," he repeated. "Ah! well-wellthe dearest, Mademoiselle Olivia; ma foi! there are so many things."

"Yes, yes," she said impatiently, "but only one or two are at the heart's core." She saw him smile at this, and reddened. "Oh, how stupid I am to ask that of a stranger! I did not mean a ladyif there is a lady."

"There is a lady," said Count Victor, twisting the fringe of her shawl that had come of itself into his fingers as she turned.

A silence followed: not even he, so versed in all the evidence of love or coquetry, could have seen a quiver to betray her even if he had thought to look for it.

"I am the one," said she at length, "who will wish you well in that; but after her-after thisthis lady-what is it that comes closest ?"

"What but my country!" cried he, with a surging sudden memory of France.

"To be sure!" she acquiesced, "your country! I am not wondering at that. And ours is the closest to the core of cores in us that have not perhaps so kind a country as yours, but still must love it when it is most cruel. We are like the folks I have read of-they were the Greeks who travelled so far among other clans upon the trade of war, and bound to burst in tears when they came after strange hills and glens to the sight of the same sea that washed the country of their infancy. Thalatta! '—was it not that they cried? When I read the story first in school in Edinburgh, I cried, my