"I shall be so pleased to think that our Welsh Fusileers, in the lands to which they are going, will have something so characteristic to remind them of home, of the wild hills of Wales, perhaps to make them think of the donor. Besides, papa says the corps has never been without this emblem of the old Principality since it was raised in the year of the Revolution." "Most true; but how shall I--how shall _we_--ever thank you?" I could see that her nether lip--a lovely little pouting lip it was--quivered slightly, and that her eyes were full of strange light, though bent downward on her horse's mane; and now I felt that, for reasons apparent enough, I was cold, even unkind, to this warm-hearted girl; for we had been better and dearer friends before we knew the Cressinghams. She checked her horse a little abruptly, and began to address some of the merest commonplaces to Phil Caradoc; who, with his thick brown curly hair parted in the middle, his smiling handsome face and white regular teeth, was finding great favour in the eyes of the laughing Dora. But now we were drawing near Craigaderyn Court. The scenery was Welsh, and yet the house and all its surroundings were in character genuinely English, though to have hinted so much might have piqued Sir Madoc. The elegance and comfort of the mansion were English, and English too was the rich verdure of the velvet lawn and the stately old chase, the trees of which were ancient enough--some of them at least--to have sheltered Owen Glendower, or echoed to the bugle of Llewellyn ap Seisalt, whose tall grave-stone stands amid the battle-mounds on grassy Castell Coch.