"'No,' he retorted, 'I dare say; but there is a good deal in belonging to a people who can understand him without clubs!'" "Oh, Francesca!" I exclaimed, sitting bolt upright among my pillows. "How _could_ you give him that chance! How could you! What did you say?" "I said nothing," she replied mysteriously. "I did something much more to the point,--I cried!" "_Cried?_" "Yes, cried; not rivers and freshets of woe, but small brooks and streamlets of helpless mortification." "What did he do then?" "Why do you say 'do'?" "Oh, I mean 'say,' of course. Don't trifle; go on. What did he say then?" "There are some things too dreadful to describe," she answered, and wrapping her Italian blanket majestically about her she retired to her own apartment, shooting one enigmatical glance at me as she closed the door. That glance puzzled me for some time after she left the room. It was as expressive and interesting a beam as ever darted from a woman's eye. The combination of elements involved in it, if an abstract thing may be conceived as existing in component parts, was something like this:-- One half, mystery. One eighth, triumph. One eighth, amusement. One sixteenth, pride. One sixteenth, shame. One sixteenth, desire to confess. One sixteenth, determination to conceal. And all these delicate, complex emotions played together in a circle of arching eyebrow, curving lip, and tremulous chin,--played together, mingling and melting into one another like fire and snow; bewildering, mystifying, enchanting the beholder! If Ronald Macdonald did--I am a woman, but, for one, I can hardly blame him! XXII "'O has he chosen a bonny bride, An' has he clean forgotten me?' An' sighing said that gay ladye, 'I would I were in my ain countrie!'" _Lord Beichan_. It rained in torrents; Salemina was darning stockings in the inglenook at Bide-a-Wee Cottage, and I was reading her a Scotch letter which Francesca and I had concocted the evening before. I proposed sending the document to certain chosen spirits in our own country, who were pleased to be facetious concerning our devotion to Scotland. It contained, in sooth, little that was new, and still less that was true, for we were confined to a very small vocabulary which we were obliged to supplement now and then by a dip into Burns and Allan Ramsay. Here is the letter:-- BIDE-A-WEE COTTAGE, PETTYBAW. _East Neuk o' Fife_.