Scotland again, or take back his name of MacDonald, until old Duncan not
only openly claimed him as a cousin, but begged him as a personal favour
to return to Scotland."

"That must have seemed like sentencing himself to perpetual banishment,"
said Basil.

"I don't know. He appears to have had a kind of prophetic faith in his
own powers of success. And he was right in every way. Duncan began to
_grovel_ years ago."

In talking of Somerled, Aline had forgotten to listen for sounds of his
approach. She was interested in the story she was telling--more
interested than she was usually in the development of her own plots. But
luckily Basil saw to the plot-making nowadays, and she hadn't to worry.
"It's funny," she went on, "that a man who laughs at romance should be
one of the most romantic figures in the world. If you and I wrote up his
story, and took him for the hero, all the critics would say 'how
impossible!' But critics will never believe that anything highly
romantic or sensational can happen really. I don't know _what_ their own
lives must be like--or what they can think of the incidents they must
see every day in the newspapers! Somerled says the only romantic thing
he ever did was to annex the name of Somerled: but almost every phase of
his life would make a story. Take his success in America, for instance.
He wasn't eighteen when he landed as an immigrant, with nothing in his
pocket except what was left of the architectural prize. Most of that
money had gone in giving his father a few last comforts, and putting up
some wonderful, extravagant sort of monuments for both his parents,
which Ian designed himself. But he hadn't been two months in New York
when he won a still bigger prize, which came just as he was on the point
of starving! A handful of oatmeal and an apple a day _I_ should call
starvation, but he says it was grand for his health. In six years, at
twenty-four, he was not only the greatest portrait-painter in America,
but one of the most successful architects, an extraordinary combination
which has made him _unique_ in modern times. And before he was
twenty-eight came that big 'coup' of his, which he calls a 'mere
accident that might have happened to any fool'--the buying of a site for
a new town in Nevada, where he meant to build up a little city of
beautiful houses, and finding a silver mine. Of course, it _wasn't_ an
'accident.' It was the spirit of prophecy in him which has always
carried him on to