He scarcely thought himself the same John Kinloch, as he drew forth the miniature from its secret drawer in the old cabinet, and sat down to contemplate it with loving and tender thoughts, and literally to 'feast' his eyes, as the phrase is, on the face of her who, before she went to sleep that night, pressed her ripe coral lips to her own hand; and they sought the exact place where the General, ere leaving, had pressed _his_. CHAPTER XII. CONCLUSION. We have not much more to relate. Maurice Morganstjern quitted the Hague suddenly, and betook him on his diplomatic mission, whatever it was, to Paris; and his compatriot the Heer van Schrekhorn thought it conducive to his personal safety to make himself scarce about the same time; so both were beyond the just vengeance of Lewie Baronald. Great was the amazement of the latter when he found his uncle, the General, quite _en famille_ at the villa of the Countess, and learned from Dolores something of what had transpired on the night of the ridotto, and of her perilous adventure. It seemed simply incredible! 'How now, uncle, about the name of Mercedes?' he asked him laughingly. 'What about it?' asked the General testily, yet reddening like a great schoolboy. 'Is it to go down in the annals of our family?' 'I hope so.' "And how about all the Dead Sea fruit, the blackness of Gehenna, your firmness, and all that?' 'Silence, you young dog!' And merrily laughed Dolores as she ran her white fingers over the piano, and sang a verse of the song that had now become so familiar to her: 'The love that I have chosen Is to my heart's content; The salt sea will be frozen, Before that I repent. Repent it will I never, Until the day I dee, Though the Lowlands o' Holland Have parted my love and me.' 'And your home is Scotland--the home to which you may take me, is it like this?' asked the Countess softly of the General, as they sat in the recess of a window; and from the question it may be safely gathered that events had progressed rapidly between them. 'Like _this_!' exclaimed the General; 'you must see it for yourself to know the difference,' he added, as his eye swept the dull, dead flat of the Dutch landscape--flat as the flattest part of England. Then he laughed as he thought of Thominean overshadowed by the majestic Ochills, the deep glens of which, with their solemn shadows and silence, are calculated to fill the soul at times with a species of poetic or melancholy ecstasy; the grey precipices past which the river rushes to Loch Leven, and the old mansion on its rock--half chateau and half fortress--of which Mercedes would some day be chatelaine. But soon after all this, a shock awaited the General, when an orderly dragoon placed in his hand a large official packet addressed to himself, and sealed with the official seal of the Dutch Republic.