y probably,' I remarked, as thoroughly angry now as he intended I
should be. 'We cannot expect you to appreciate all the American poets;
indeed, you cannot appreciate all of your own, for the same nation
doesn't always furnish the writers and the readers. Take your precious
Browning, for example! There are hundreds of Browning Clubs in
America, and I never heard of a single one in Scotland.'

"'No,' he retorted, 'I dare say; but there is a good deal in belonging
to a people who can understand him without clubs!'"

"Oh, Francesca!" I exclaimed, sitting bolt upright among my pillows.
"How _could_ you give him that chance! How could you! What did you
say?"

"I said nothing," she replied mysteriously. "I did something much more
to the point,--I cried!"

"_Cried?_"

"Yes, cried; not rivers and freshets of woe, but small brooks and
streamlets of helpless mortification."

"What did he do then?"

"Why do you say 'do'?"

"Oh, I mean 'say,' of course. Don't trifle; go on. What did he say
then?"

"There are some things too dreadful to describe," she answered, and
wrapping her Italian blanket majestically about her she retired to her
own apartment, shooting one enigmatical glance at me as she closed the
door.

That glance puzzled me for some time after she left the room. It was
as expressive and interesting a beam as ever darted from a woman's
eye. The combination of elements involved in it, if an abstract thing
may be conceived as existing in component parts, was something like
this:--

One half, mystery.

One eighth, triumph.

One eighth, amusement.

One sixteenth, pride.

One sixteenth, shame.

One sixteenth, desire to confess.

One sixteenth, determination to conceal.

And all these delicate, complex emotions played together in a circle
of arching eyebrow, curving lip, and tremulous chin,--played together,
mingling and melting into one another like fire and snow; bewildering,
mystifying, enchanting the beholder!

If Ronald Macdonald did--I am a woman, but, for one, I can hardly
blame him!

XXII

"'O has he chosen a bonny bride,
An' has he clean forgotten me?'
An' sighing said that gay ladye,
'I would I were in my ain countrie!'"

_Lord Beichan_.

It rained in torrents; Salemina was darning stockings in the inglenook
at Bide-a-Wee Cottage, and I was reading her a Scotch letter which
Francesca and I had concocted the evening before. I