n with the bare feet. The deil's buckie! Ye
kent yersel' brawly wha it was."

"I, Master Mungo! Faith, not I!"

Mungo looked incredulous.

"And what ails the ladyship, for she kent? I'll swear she kent the next
day, though I took guid care no' to say cheep."

"I daresay you are mistaken there, my good Mungo."

"Mistaken! No me! It wasna a' thegither in a tantrum o' an ordinar' kind
she broke her tryst wi' him the very nicht efter ye left for the inns
doon by. At onyrate, if she didna' ken then she kens noo, I'll warrant."

"Not so far as I am concerned, certainly."

Mungo looked incredulous. That any one should let go the chance of
conveying so rare a piece of gossip to persons so immediately concerned
was impossible of belief. "Na, na," said he, shaking his head; "she has
every word o't, or her faither at least, and that's the same thing. But
shoon or nae shoon, yon's the man for my money!"

"Again he has my felicitations," said Count Victor, with a good humour
unfailing. Indeed he could afford to be good-humoured if this were true.
So here was the explanation of Olivia's condescension, her indifference
to her lover's injury, of which her father could not fail to have
apprised her even if Mungo had been capable of a miracle and held his
tongue. The Chamberlain, then, was no longer in favour! Here was joy!
Count Victor could scarce contain himself. How many women would have
been flattered at the fierceness of devotion implied in a lover's
readiness to commit assassination out of sheer jealousy of a
supposititious rival in her affections? But Olivia--praise _le bon
Dieu!_--was not like that.

He thrust the coat into Mungo's hands and went hurriedly up to his room
to be alone with his thoughts, that he feared might show themselves
plainly in his face if he met either the lady or her father, and there
for the first time had a memory of Cecile--some odd irrelevance of a
memory--in which she figured in a masque in a Paris garden. Good God!
that he should have failed to see it before; this Cecile had been an
actress, as, he told himself, were most of her sex he had hitherto
encountered, and 'twas doubtful if he once had touched her soul. Olivia
had shown him now, in silences, in sighs, in some unusual _aura_ of
sincerity that was round her like the innocence of infancy, that what
he thought was love a year ago was but its drossy elements. Seeking the
first woman in the eyes of the second, he had found the perfect lo