What could so great a man find to do there? In a distant and disdainful fashion Sir Bunny knew Abbey Burnfoot. It was not even a mansion--merely a new-fangled sort of cottage at the best--built in Italian fashion, they said, but after all, only two score yards of garden, with a narrow rim of links overgrown with sea pink and ground holly. It was stuck ridiculously in between the white sands and the pour of the Abbey Burn--no drives or pleasances, no cropped hedges and trim parterres--nothing, in short, which Royalty had a right to expect when visiting a real gentleman's country seat, such as he flattered himself could be found at Bunny House in the shire of Wigton. It did not occur to Sir Bunny Bunny, with his poor little squireen's point of view, that His Royal Highness might possibly come to see, not long avenues and close cropped hedges, but his old kind chief of Constantinople and Vienna. So he was forced to content himself with many shakings of his head, and muttering that the country was going to the dogs when princes consorted with beggars or little better, as he rode off home to Bunny House in desperate fear of what his wife Lady Bunny would say when he got there. CHAPTER VII THE LADS IN THE HEATHER Patsy came into her uncle Julian's drawing-room in her most tempestuous manner. She had been for a gallop along the sands on Stair Garland's pony and had beaten Louis de Raincy's Honeypot by a length. She was in high feather, and as she tramped along the cool parqueted hall she kept calling out, "Uncle Ju--where are you, Uncle Ju?" When she opened the door and dashed in she disturbed the conference of three men by the window, one of whom was in uniform, and the other two dressed in the latest fashion, of which Patsy had as yet only seen prints at the end of her uncle's _Town and Country Magazine_--a review which, curiously enough, always lacked some of its pages by the time Patsy was allowed to see it. "Oh," said Patsy, no ways abashed, "you have come to see my uncle--will you be seated?" Patsy noticed that the tallest of the young men made a slight sign to his companions, and that they sat down as if in answer to that signal instead of accepting her invitation at once. "We have indeed come a long distance in order to call on Mr. Julian Wemyss," said the young man of the signal. "I knew him at Vienna, and as I was passing through from Ireland, I took this opportunity of paying my respects to him. But it is better still to find such a charming young lady installed in his house to do the honours!" "Oh," said Patsy, "I do not live here, but with my father at the other end of the glen. I only come every day to cheer him up--Uncle Ju is so apt to get the 'pokes'!" "The 'pokes'--what are they?" exclaimed the tall and ruddy young man, who continued to stare at her in a manner which would have discountenanced any other than Patsy.