ion,
as of one recalling fondly that which was past and lost. Yet there was
strength and swiftness in his limbs; and his mouth set straight across
his face, the under lip a thought upon side, like that of a man
accustomed to resolve. These two talked together in a rude outlandish
speech that no frequenter of that wine-shop understood. The swarthy man
answered to the name of _Ballantrae_; he of the dreamy eyes was
sometimes called _Balmile_, and sometimes _my Lord_, or _my Lord
Gladsmuir_; but when the title was given him, he seemed to put it by as
if in jesting, not without bitterness.

The mistral blew in the city. The first day of that wind, they say in
the countries where its voice is heard, it blows away all the dust, the
second all the stones, and the third it blows back others from the
mountains. It was now come to the third day; outside the pebbles flew
like hail, and the face of the river was puckered, and the very
building-stones in the walls of houses seemed to be curdled, with the
savage cold and fury of that continuous blast. It could be heard to hoot
in all the chimneys of the city; it swept about the wine-shop, filling
the room with eddies; the chill and gritty touch of it passed between
the nearest clothes and the bare flesh; and the two gentlemen at the far
table kept their mantles loose about their shoulders. The roughness of
these outer hulls, for they were plain travellers' cloaks that had seen
service, set the greater mark of richness on what showed below of their
laced clothes; for the one was in scarlet and the other in violet and
white, like men come from a scene of ceremony; as indeed they were.

It chanced that these fine clothes were not without their influence on
the scene which followed, and which makes the prologue of our tale. For
a long time Balmile was in the habit to come to the wine-shop and eat a
meal or drink a measure of wine; sometimes with a comrade; more often
alone, when he would sit and dream and drum upon the table, and the
thoughts would show in the man's face in little glooms and lightenings,
like the sun and the clouds upon a water. For a long time
Marie-Madeleine had observed him apart. His sadness, the beauty of his
smile when by any chance he remembered her existence and addressed her,
the changes of his mind signalled forth by an abstruse play of feature,
the mere fact that he was foreign and a thing detached from the local
and the accustomed, insensibly attracted and a