h 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!

Chapter XXII. Francesca entertains the green-eyed monster.

'"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 proposed sending the
document to certain chosen spirits in our own country, who were pleased
to be facetious concerning our devotion to Scotland. It contained, in
sooth, little that was new, and still less that was true, for we were
confined to a very small vocabulary which we were obliged to supplement
now and then by a dip into Burns and Allan Ramsay.

Here is the letter:--

Bide-a-Wee Cottage, Pettybaw,
East Neuk o' Fife.

To my trusty fieres,

Mony's the time I hae ettled to send ye a screed, but there was aye
something that cam' i' the gait. It wisna that I couldna be fashed, for
aften hae I thocht o' ye and my hairt has been wi' ye mony's the day.
There's no' muckle fowk frae Ameriky hereawa; they're a'