hints of rain
on the horizon and white caps to the waves, betokening perhaps a storm
not far distant. Children were in the wood of Dunderave--ruddy, shy
children, gathering nuts and blackberries, with merriment haunting the
landscape as it were in a picture by Watteau or a tale of the classics,
where such figures happily move for ever and for ever in the right
golden glamour. Little elves they seemed to Count Victor as he came upon
them over an eminence, and saw them for the first time through the trees
under tall oaks and pines, among whose pillars they moved as if in fairy
cloisters, the sea behind them shining with a vivid and stinging blue.

He had come upon them frowning, his mind full of doubts as to the
hazards of his adventure in Argyll, convinced almost that the Baron of
Doom was right, and that the needle in the haystack was no more
hopeless a quest than that he had set out on, and the spectacle of their
innocence in the woodland soothed him like a psalm in a cathedral as
he stood to watch. Unknowing of his presence there, they ran and
played upon the grass, their lips stained with the berry-juice, their
pillow-slips of nuts gathered beneath a bush of whin. They laughed, and
chanted merry rhymes: a gaiety their humble clothing lent them touched
the thickets with romance.

In other circumstances than fate had set about his life, Count Victor
might have been a good man--a good man not in the common sense that
means paying the way, telling the truth, showing the open hand,
respecting the law, going to Mass, loyalty to the woman and to a friend,
but in the rare, wide manner that comprehends all these, and has its
growth in human affection and religious faith. He loved birds; animals
ever found him soft-handed; as for children--the _petites_--God bless
them! was he not used to stand at his window at home and glow to see
them playing in the street? And as he watched the urchins in the wood of
Dunderave, far from the scenes he knew, children babbling in an uncouth
language whose smallest word he could not comprehend, he felt an
elevation of his spirit that he indulged by sitting on the grass above
them, looking at their play and listening to their laughter as if it
were an opera.

He forgot his fears, his apprehensions, his ignoble little emprise of
revenge; he felt a better man, and he had his reward as one shall ever
have who sits a space with childish merriment and woodland innocence. In
his case it was somethi