be heard in neighbouring thickets that seemed from the island
inaccessible, and when gun and line failed him it was perhaps not wholly
wanting his persuasion that kain fowls came from the hamlet expressly
for "her ladyship" Olivia. In pauses of the wind he and Annapla
were to be heard in other quarters of the house in clamant
conversation--otherwise it had seemed to Count Victor that Doom was
left, an enchanted castle, to him and Olivia alone. For the father
relapsed anew into his old strange melancholies, dozing over his books,
indulging feint and riposte in the chapel overhead, or gazing moodily
along the imprisoned coast.

That he was free to dress now as he chose in his beloved tartan
entertained him only briefly; obviously half the joy of his former
recreations in the chapel had been due to the fact that they were
clandestine; now that he could wear what he chose indoors, he pined that
he could not go into the deer-haunted woods and the snowy highways
in the _breacan_ as of old. But that was not his only distress, Count
Victor was sure.

"What accounts for your father's melancholy?" he had the boldness one
day to ask Olivia.

They were at the window together, amused at the figure Mungo presented
as with an odd travesty of the soldier's strategy, and all unseen as he
fancied, he chased a fowl round the narrow confines of the garden, bent
upon its slaughter.

"And do you not know the reason for that?" she asked, with her humour
promptly clouded, and a loving and pathetic glance over her shoulder at
the figure bent beside the fire. "What is the dearest thing to you?"

She could have put no more embarrassing question to Count Victor, and it
was no wonder he stammered in his reply.

"The dearest," he repeated. "Ah! well--well--the dearest, Mademoiselle
Olivia; _ma foi!_ there are so many things."

"Yes, yes," she said impatiently, "but only one or two are at the
heart's core." She saw him smile at this, and reddened. "Oh, how stupid
I am to ask that of a stranger! I did not mean a lady--if there is a
lady."

"There _is_ a lady," said Count Victor, twisting the fringe of her shawl
that had come of itself into his fingers as she turned.

A silence followed; not even he, so versed in all the evidence of love
or coquetry, could have seen a quiver to betray her even if he had
thought to look for it.

"I am the one," said she at length, "who will wish you well in that; but
after her--after this--this lady--what