ys
yet--possibly another week. The Circuit Court has left a pack of the
legal gentlemen and jurymen there, who will not be persuaded to return
to Edinburgh so long as the cellar at the inn holds out, and my doer,
Mr. Petullo, expresses a difficulty in getting any other lodging."

"I regret exceedingly--"

"No regret at all, M. le Count," said Doom, "no regret at all, unless it
be that you must put up with a while longer of a house that must be very
dull to you. It is my privilege and pleasure to have you here--without
prejudice to your mission--and the only difficulty there might be about
it has been removed through--through--through your meeting with my
daughter Olivia. I learn you met her on the stair last night. Well--it
would look droll, I dare say, to have encountered that way, and no
word of her existence from me, but--but--but there has been a little
disagreement between us. I hope I am a decently indulgent father, M. le
Count, but--"

"You see before you one with great shame of his awkwardness, Baron,"
said Montaiglon. "Ordinarily, I should respect a host's privacy to the
extent that I should walk a hundred miles round rather than stumble upon
it, but this time I do not know whether to blame myself for my gaucherie
or feel pleased that for once it brought me into good company. Mungo has
just hinted with his customary discretion at the cause of the mystery.
I sympathise with the father; I am, with the daughter, _tres charme_
and--"

This hint of the gallant slightly ruffled Doom.

"Chut!" he cried. "The man with an only daughter had need be a man of
patience. I have done my best with this Olivia of mine. She lost her
mother when a child"--an accent of infinite tenderness here came to his
voice. "These woods and this shore and this lonely barn of ours, all
robbed of what once made it a palace to me and mine, were, I fancied,
uncongenial to her spirit, and I sent her to the Lowlands. She came
back, educated, as they call it--I think she brought back as good a
heart as she took away, but singularly little tolerance sometimes for
the life in the castle of Doom. It has been always the town for her
these six months, always the town, for there she fell in with a fellow
who is no fancy of mine."

Count Victor listened sympathetically, somewhat envying the lover,
reviving in his mental vision the figure he had seen first twelve hours
ago or less. He was brought to a more vivid interest in the story by
the altered