For some time past his lordship had cunningly dropped the _rôle_ of lover and adopted that of friend, perhaps to throw Alison off her guard, and as he did not--as some old fellows do--act 'the paternal' part, to a certain extent she became so, and her normal state or feeling of defiance and dislike was dulled for a time. Thus her face looked calm and placid, with a curiously pathetic expression, and her eyes had at times a far-away look in them that gave Sir Ranald a strange dull pain in his heart, especially one evening, when, taking grapes one by one from a plate of painted Antwerp china-ware, she fed him playfully as a nurse might a child. 'Bird Ailie,' said he, 'my dear bird Ailie.' He saw how her hand looked quite transparent, and a pang of dismay smote his heart. 'You are not well, darling,' said he. 'Oh, yes, papa,' she replied, with affected cheerfulness, 'I am very well; but oh, if we were only home again out of this foggy Antwerp. I think I could wheel you about in a bath chair as well as old Archie, were we only home to----' '_Where?_' he asked, sharply. 'But I must take care of you now for my own sake. This confinement is killing you; go out somewhere, anywhere under Cadbury's escort.' But Alison shook her head. As yet she had seen nothing of the famous city of Antwerp, though she could not look forth from her windows in the quaint Place Verte, or along the Marché aux Souliers, with all its shops, without a longing to explore, everything seemed so strange, so striking; for, as Sir Walter Scott wrote truthfully and graphically, 'it is in the streets of Antwerp and Brussels that the eye rests upon the forms of architecture which appear in the pictures of the Flemish school--those fronts richly decorated with various ornaments, and terminating in roofs, the slope of which is concealed from the eye by windows and gables still more highly ornamented; the whole comprising a general effect which, from its grandeur and intricacy, at once amuses and delights the spectator. In fact, this rich intermixture of towers and battlements and projecting windows, highly sculptured, joined to the height of the houses and the variety of ornaments upon their fronts, produce an effect as superior to those of the tame uniformity of a modern street as the casque of a warrior exhibits over the slouched, broad-brimmed beaver of a Quaker.' Another remarkable feature in the Belgian streets is the enormous height of the front doors, with rings and knockers of brass often more than a foot in diameter. Lord Cadbury had received a card of invitation _pour milord et ses dames_ to a _Redoute monstre et fête de nuit_ at the Théâtre des Variétés, where there was to be a species of _bal masqué_ in the great saloon, and on the stage a 'Kermesse Flamande, Fête Venitienne,' as it was announced, and he treated Sir Ranald's permission to take Alison with him, simply as a spectator in her street costume.