is it that comes closest?"

"What but my country!" cried he, with a surging sudden memory of France.

"To be sure!" she acquiesced, "your country! I am not wondering at that.
And ours is the closest to the core of cores in us that have not perhaps
so kind a country as yours, but still must love it when it is most
cruel. We are like the folks I have read of--they were the Greeks who
travelled so far among other clans upon the trade of war, and bound to
burst in tears when they came after strange hills and glens to the
sight of the same sea that washed the country of their infancy.
'Tha-latta!'--was it not that they cried? When I read the story first in
school in Edinburgh, I cried, myself, 'Lochfinne!' and thought I heard
the tide rumbling upon this same rock. It is for that; it is because we
must be leaving here my father is sad."

Here indeed was news

"Leaving!" said Count Victor in astonishment.

"It is so. My father has been robbed; his people have been foolish; it
is not a new thing in the Highlands of Scotland, Count Victor. You must
not be thinking him a churl to be moping and leaving you to my poor
entertainment, for it is ill to keep the pipes in tune when one is
drying tears."

"Where will you go?" asked Count Victor, disturbed at the tidings and
the distress she so bravely struggled to conceal.

"Where? indeed!" said Olivia. "That I cannot tell you yet. But the world
is wide, and it is strange if there is any spot of it where we cannot
find some of our own Gaelic people who have been flitting for a
generation, taking the world for their pillow. What is it that shall
not come to an end? My sorrow! the story on our door down there has
been preparing me for this since ever I was a bairn. My
great-great-grandfather was the wise man and the far-seeing when he
carved it there--'Man, Behauld the End of All, Be nocht Wiser than the
Hiest. Hope in God!'" She struggled courageously with her tears that
could not wholly be restrained, and there and then he could have
gathered her into his arms. But he must keep himself in bounds and twist
the fringes of her shawl.

"Ah, Olivia," said he, "you will die for the sight of home."

At that she dashed her hand across her eyes and boldly faced him,
smiling.

"That would be a shameful thing in a Baron's daughter," said she. "No,
indeed! when we must rise and go away, here is the woman who will go
bravely! We live not in glens, in this house nor in that, but in the
he