a kissed her hand respectfully.

"Miss Salemina," he said, with evident emotion, "I want to borrow one
of your national jewels for my Queen's crown."

"And what will our President say to lose a jewel from his crown?"

"Good republican rulers do not wear coronets, as a matter of
principle," he argued; "but in truth I fear I am not thinking of her
Majesty--God bless her! This gem is not entirely for state occasions.

'I would wear it in my bosom,
Lest my jewel I should tine.'

It is the crowning of my own life rather than that of the British
Empire that engages my present thought. Will you intercede for me with
Francesca's father?"

"And this is the end of all your international bickering?" Salemina
asked teasingly.

"Yes," he answered; "we have buried the hatchet, signed articles of
agreement, made treaties of international comity. Francesca stays over
here as a kind of missionary to Scotland, so she says, or as a
feminine diplomat; she wishes to be on hand to enforce the Monroe
Doctrine properly, in case her government's accredited ambassadors
relax in the performance of their duty."

"Salemina!" called a laughing voice outside the door. "I am won'erful
lifted up. You will be a prood woman the day, for I am now
Estaiblished!" and Francesca, clad in Miss Grieve's Sunday bonnet,
shawl, and black cotton gloves, entered and curtsied demurely to the
floor. She held, as corroborative detail, a life of John Knox in her
hand, and anything more incongruous than her sparkling eyes and
mutinous mouth under the melancholy head-gear can hardly be imagined.

"I am now Estaiblished," she repeated. "Div ye ken the new asseestant
frae Inchcawdy pairish? I'm the mon" (a second deep curtsy here). "I
trust, leddies, that ye'll mak' the maist o' your releegious
preevileges, an' that ye'll be constant at the kurruk.--Have you given
papa's consent, Salemina? And isn't it dreadful that he is Scotch?"

"Isn't it dreadful that she is not?" asked Mr. Macdonald. "Yet to my
mind no woman in Scotland is half as lovable as she!"

"And no man in America begins to compare with him," Francesca
confessed sadly. "Isn't it pitiful that out of the millions of our own
countrypeople we couldn't have found somebody that would do? What do
you think now, Lord Ronald Macdonald, of those dangerous international
alliances?"

"You never understood that speech of mine," he replied, with prompt
mendacity. "When I said that international marriage