rant of varlets! Now I pose it on my
princessly locks! So!), or just Patsy Ferris, in blue gown and
yellow sandals, very much out of breath, washing the dishes in the
Bothy of the Wild of Blairmore?

"Tell me which you think I should like best. I deliver this subject
to your meditations. You are not to show my letter to Jean nor
allow her to read a single word of hers to you. If you do, I shall
hold you for ever faithless and mansworn!

"Your obedient, faithful scullery-maid _or_ princess,

"PATSY."

CHAPTER XXII

WINTER AFTERNOON

The winter was lying heavy and sore on the Wild of Blairmore. The storms
from the North-west brought down the scouring snow, and even to go to
the edge of the sand-dunes to meet Joseph was an undertaking. Only by
continual endeavours with the great iron 'gellick' was the well kept
from freezing. The frost had long ago laid hands upon the inky ponds and
morasses and bound them as it had been with solid iron.

* * * * *

But at Hanover Lodge the fires glowed warm in open grates. The rich,
solid, early Georgian furniture gave back reflections ripe and fruity,
and the brass fenders shone in the flicker of the firelight. The
Princess used sea-coal fires, to which, as a daughter of the land of
pines, she added split and well-dried logs of resinous wood. These she
would arrange with her own hands after the Bohemian fashion, pausing
often to tell her guest tales of the times when, at the convent, she and
Marie Louise had stolen from the Mother Superior's woodpile to keep from
freezing.

Patsy knitted diligently and before her a book lay open, but she read
little. For the Princess, recalling old things and speaking copiously,
looked often at her for sympathy and understanding. Miss Aline had gone
to lie down with a book, so the two younger ladies were alone, and, as
it seemed little likely that any visitors would venture so far from home
that day they had settled themselves in the comfort of the Princess's
boudoir, content with each other and content with the weather. Patsy had
been teaching her companion such phrases as "a blatter o' sleet," an
"on-ding o' snaw," and a "thresh o' rain."

The Princess had a peculiar pleasure in learning such things and would
often subtly misapply them in order to be corrected. She would tempt
Patsy into further descriptions of the Twin Valleys, the Bay of the
Abbey Bur