Loop up this heavy drapery—Katie Stewart is not aware of any one looking at her. Her fingers, threaded through these curls, support her cheek—her shoulders are carelessly curved—her other ungloved arm leans upon the frame of her embroidery, and her graceful little head bends forward, looking out with absorbed unconscious eyes. Now there comes a wakening to the dreamy face, a start to the still figure. What is it? Only some one passing below, who lifts his bonnet from his bright young forehead, and bows as he passes. Perhaps the bow is for Lady Anne, faintly visible at another window. Lady Anne thinks so, and quietly returns it as a matter of course; but not so thinks Katie Stewart. The Honourable Andrew Colville changes his seat: it is to bring himself into a better light for observing that picture in the window, which, with a critic’s delight, he notes and outlines. But Katie all the while is quite unconscious, and now takes two or three meditative stitches, and now leans on the frame, idly musing, without a thought that any one sees or looks at her. By and by Mr Colville rises, to stand by the crimson curtain where Sir Alexander stood on the previous night, and Katie at last becomes conscious of a look of admiration very different from the shy glances of the youthful knight. But Mr Colville is full thirty: the little belle has a kind of compassionate forbearance with him, and is neither angry nor fluttered. She has but indifferent cause to be flattered, it is true, for the Honourable Andrew admires her just as he admires the magnificent lace which droops over his thin white hands; but still he is one of the _cognoscenti_, and bestows his notice only on the beautiful. And he talks to her, pleased with the shrewd answers which she sometimes gives; and Katie has to rein in her wandering thoughts, and feels guilty when she finds herself inattentive to this grandest of grand gentlemen; while Lady Betty, looking over at them anxiously from her great chair, thinks that little Katie’s head will be turned. It is in a fair way; for when Mr Colville, smiling his sweetest smile to her, has bowed himself out, and Katie goes up-stairs to change her dress preparatory to a drive in Lady Betty’s great coach, Bauby approaches her mysteriously with a little cluster of white rosebuds in her hand. “Muckle fash it has ta’en to get them at this time o’ the year, Miss Katie, ye may depend,” said the oracular Bauby; “and ye ken best yoursel wha they’re frae.” The white rose—the badge of rebellion! But the little Whig puts it happily in her breast, and, when Bauby leaves her, laughs aloud in wonderment and pleasure; but, alas! only as she laughed, not very long ago, at this new black mantle or these cambric ruffles; for you are only a new plaything, gallant Sir Alexander, with some novelty and excitement about you. You are not the hero. CHAPTER XII.