'No wonder it is, perhaps, that Lewie loves me,' thought the girl, as she looked at the reflection of her own sweet face in a little bit of oval mirror in the back of her huge Dutch fan; 'I _am_ pretty!' She might have said 'lovely,' and more than lovely; and then she smiled consciously at her own vanity. Under the genial influence of her surroundings the heart of the girl was full of happiness, and had but one regret that Lewie Baronald was not there. Yet, she thought, 'to-morrow I shall see him--to-morrow be with my darling, who at this moment is thinking of me.' And amid the brilliance of the scene, so rich in the variety of colour and costume, the strains of the music and beauty of the old Dutch pleasure-grounds, she almost longed to be alone, with the grass, the birds, the insects, and the flowers--alone in the sweet summer evening with the perfume of the roses, the jasmine, and the glorious honeysuckle around her. On one hand, about a mile distant, was the Hague, with all its Gothic spires and pointed gables; on the other spread the landscape so usual in that country of cheese and butter--church-towers and wind-mills, bright farmhouses, long rows of willow-trees, their green foliage ruffling up white in the passing breeze; the grassy dykes and embankments, a long continuity of horizontal lines, which seemed so tame and insipid to the mountaineers of the Scots Brigade, and to all but the Dutch themselves. Among the groups around her, Dolores, as usual now, heard the growing political quarrel between Great Britain and Holland openly and freely discussed, together with the consequent and too probable departure of the Scots Brigade from the latter for ever. That seemed almost a settled thing--a certainty, if the quarrel became an open one, and the probabilities wrung the girl's affectionate heart. How would all this affect her lover and herself? Alas! she knew not that the doom of the former for foreign service was nearly a fixed thing now! And she was fated to receive her first mental shock that evening, all unwittingly, from the Earl of Drumlanrig, who drew near her, and with the stately manner of the time lifted his hat with one hand, and with the other touched her hand as he bowed over it. The golden light of the setting sun fell full upon her hair, flecking its bronze with glorious tints, and giving her beauty a brilliance that, to the Earl's appreciative eye, was very striking. 'You look like one of Watteau's beauties, waiting to hear herself addressed in the language of Love,' said the old peer, smiling. 'Love has three languages, my lord,' observed Dolores. 'Three?' 'The pen, the tongue, and the eyes.' 'True; but I am too old to use any of these now,' said the Earl, shaking his powdered head. 'The evening is a lovely one,' observed Dolores, after a pause. 'And the landscape yonder, as it stretches away towards Delft, is wonderfully steeped in sunshine; and but for its flatness----' the Earl paused.