ul dark
head on the pillow of his bed.

"Couldn't you take me with you once, Shane, when you sail? Away on just
one voyage?"

"Of course I could, dearest, and will."

"Would you, my heart? Would you?" She stood up again, and swift tears
came to her eyes.

"I couldn't come," she said.

"But, Claire-Anne--"

"No," she said. She turned her back to him, so that he shouldn't see her
face, and her voice vibrated. "No, Shane dear. No. You go to sea and
sail your ships, and take care of them in the tempest and coax them in
light weather. And go from port to port, watching the strange cities and
the peoples, and seeing into them, with ... _tes yeux d'enfant_ ... your
eyes of a child.... And have your life, free, big, clean.... And just in
a corner ... _le plus petit coin_ ... keep me ... so when you come to
Marseilles, you will come up the garden path in the dusk, and call,
'Claire-Anne!'" There was something like a sob from her. "Just say,
'Claire-Anne'...."

She turned around and caught his hands for a minute, looked at him,
smiled, laughed.... From his desk she picked up the Young Pretender's
dagger.

"What is this for, Shane? Is this yours?"

"Mine now, Claire-Anne; but it was--some one else's once. My Uncle Alan,
Alan Donn, gave it to me."

"Yes?..."

"It belonged once to Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender. He wore
it at his knee in '45. Do you remember, Claire-Anne? He landed in
Scotland and advanced on England, and got as far as Derby at the head of
the Scottish clans and Jacobite gentlemen. 'Black Friday' they called it
in London."

"But he never got to London."

"No, he never got to London. Crash and whir of battle, and when the
smoke cleared, there were the gallant Highland clansmen scattered, and
the sturdy English nobles, and the bonny Irish gentlemen. And a king on
the run!"

"And, Shane, what happened to him after that?"

"I think--my history may not be right, but I think he spent the rest of
his life a pensioner of the king of France, playing petty politics,
drinking, and accepting love from romantic women, and loyalty from the
beaten clans."

"What a pity, Shane! What a pity!"

"That he failed, dearest? I don't know."

"Not that he failed, Shane! No! The most gallant fail, nearly always
fail, for they take the greatest odds. But that he lived too long, Shane
... the high moment gone...."

She looked at the dagger again that had once snuggled to Prince
Tearloch's knee, hefted i