with some reluctance, Sir Bunny pointed to
the chimneys of Ladykirk quietly reeking through the trees, and with a
hasty lift of his reins the officer rode on, leaving the baronet staring
after him, wondering whether he ought to tell his wife, or if he should
leave her to find out for herself.

His brain wheeled. For Julian Wemyss, whom none of them, except Miss
Aline, had chosen to know, was receiving at his house, hitherto the
eyesore and scandal of the neighbourhood, a Prince of the blood Royal.
After all, there must have been something in that talk of great ladies
heartbroken because of this Julian Wemyss, in whom the county saw
nothing, and in whose ambassadorship they had refused to believe, even
though his resignation of it so unexpectedly had been commented upon in
the _Edinburgh Magazine_, which was taken in by Sir Bunny and passed
round afterwards from house to house.

What could so great a man find to do there? In a distant and disdainful
fashion Sir Bunny knew Abbey Burnfoot. It was not even a mansion--merely
a new-fangled sort of cottage at the best--built in Italian fashion,
they said, but after all, only two score yards of garden, with a narrow
rim of links overgrown with sea pink and ground holly. It was stuck
ridiculously in between the white sands and the pour of the Abbey
Burn--no drives or pleasances, no cropped hedges and trim
parterres--nothing, in short, which Royalty had a right to expect when
visiting a real gentleman's country seat, such as he flattered himself
could be found at Bunny House in the shire of Wigton.

It did not occur to Sir Bunny Bunny, with his poor little squireen's
point of view, that His Royal Highness might possibly come to see, not
long avenues and close cropped hedges, but his old kind chief of
Constantinople and Vienna.

So he was forced to content himself with many shakings of his head, and
muttering that the country was going to the dogs when princes consorted
with beggars or little better, as he rode off home to Bunny House in
desperate fear of what his wife Lady Bunny would say when he got there.

CHAPTER VII

THE LADS IN THE HEATHER

Patsy came into her uncle Julian's drawing-room in her most tempestuous
manner. She had been for a gallop along the sands on Stair Garland's
pony and had beaten Louis de Raincy's Honeypot by a length. She was in
high feather, and as she tramped along the cool parqueted hall she kept
calling out, "Uncle Ju--where are you,