les, and, shifting the scissors into her left
hand, held out her right.

"H'm," said she; "I give ye good morning, Mosha. And what might you be
wanting of us this time?"

"Madam," I answered, "that, I hope, is fairly evident."

Ronald came forward. "I congratulate you, St. Ives, with all my heart.
And you may congratulate me: I have my commission."

"Nay, then," said I, "let me rather congratulate France that the war is
over. Seriously, my dear fellow, I wish you joy. What's the regiment?"

"The 4-th."

"Chevenix's!"

"Chevenix is a decent fellow. He has behaved very well, indeed he has."

"Very well indeed," said Flora, nodding her head.

"He has the knack. But if you expect me to like him any the better for
it----"

"Major Chevenix," put in Miss Gilchrist in her most Rhadamanthine voice,
"always sets me in mind of a pair of scissors." She opened and shut the
pair in her hand, and I had to confess that the stiff and sawing action
was admirably illustrative. "But I wish to heaven, madam," thought I,
"you could have chosen another simile!"

In the evening of that beatific day I walked back to Edinburgh by some
aerial and rose-clouded path not indicated on the maps. It led somehow
to my lodgings, and my feet touched earth when the door was opened to me
by Bethiah McRankine.

"But where is Rowley?" I asked a moment later, looking round my
sitting-room.

Mrs. McRankine smiled sardonically. "Him? He came back rolling his eyes
so that I guessed him to be troubled in the wind. And he's in bed this
hour past with a spoonful of peppermint in his little wame."

* * * * *

And here I may ring down the curtain upon the adventures of Anne de
Saint-Yves.

Flora and I were married early in June, and had been settled for little
over six months, amid the splendours of Amersham Place, when news came
of the Emperor's escape from Elba. Throughout the consequent alarums and
excursions of the Hundred Days (as M. de Chambord named them for us), I
have to confess that the Vicomte Anne sat still and warmed his hands at
the domestic hearth. To be sure, Napoleon had been my master, and I had
no love for the _cocarde blanche_. But here was I, an Englishman,
already, in legal but inaccurate phrase, a "naturalised" one, having, as
Mr. Romaine put it, a stake in the country, not to speak of a nascent
interest in its game-laws and the local administration of justice. In
short, here was a situation to