ye no? Aweel, then, its nae matter," said the dame.

"But what tales are there, Mrs. Ross?" uneasily inquired the heiress.
And then she instantly perceived the indiscretion of her question, and
regretted that she had asked it.

"Ou aye, it's just the fule talk o' thae gossips up by Ben Lone. They
behoove to say that's its na the game that draws the young laird sae
often to Ben Lone; but just Rab Cameron's handsome lass, Rose, and she
_is_ a handsome quean as I said before; but nae 'are to mak' the
young master lose his head for a' that! Sae ye maun na beleiv' a word
of it, me young leddy," said Dame Girzie.

And she hastened to change the subject.

"Ah! what a power beauty is! It can make a prince forget his royal state,
and sue to a peasant girl," sighed Salome to herself. "I wonder--I
wonder, if there _is_ any truth in that report? Oh, I hope there is
not, for his own sake. I wonder where he is--what he is doing? But that
is no affair of mine. I have nothing at all to do with it! I wonder if I
shall ever meet him. I wonder if he would think me very ugly? Nonsense,
what if he should? He is nothing to me. I--I _do_ wonder if a young
man so noble in character, so handsome in person as he is, ever could
like a girl without any beauty at all, even if she--even if she--Oh,
dear! what a fool I am! I had better never have come out of the convent.
I will think no more about him," said Salome, resolutely taking up a
volume of the "Lives of the Saints," and turning to the page that related
how--

"St. Rosalie,
Darling of each heart and eye,
From all the youth of Italy
Retired to God."

"That is the noblest love and service, after all," she said--"the
noblest, surely, because it is Divine!"

And she resolved to emulate the example of the young and beautiful
Italian virgin. She, too, would retire to God. That is, she would enter
her convent as soon as her three probationary years should be passed.

But though she so resolved to devote herself to Heaven in this abnormal
way, the natural human love that now glowed in her heart, would not be
put down by an unnatural resolve.

Days and nights passed, and she still thought of the banished heir all
day, and dreamed of him all night--the more intensely as well as purely
perhaps, because she had never looked upon his living face.

To her he was an abstract ideal.

Later in the month her father returned to Lone--on business of more
importance than that whic