tle and suddenly felt that he was
growing old. For a while they spoke of what had occurred during
Irving's absence from America, the countries the young author had
visited, the great men he had met on his travels. Finally he told her
of his visit to Sir Walter Scott, "days of solid enchantment," he
described them, from the moment when the famous author had limped down
to the gate of his estate in Scotland to welcome him, his favorite
stag hound leaping about him, as he grasped his guest's hand.

"We spent much of our time in long rambles over the hills," Irving
continued, "Scott telling me legends of the countryside as only he
could tell them. And in the evenings we would sit like medieval barons
before the blazing logs in the great dim hall at Abbotsford and there
would be more stories and confidences until long after midnight. Ah,
Rebecca, it was worth a trip across the Atlantic, just to touch his
hand."

She leaned toward him, her eyes sparkling. "How I would like to know
him--not only his books, which I love so much, but the real man in his
home," she cried.

Irving smiled mysteriously. "You may not know him, but he knows you
well, my lady. I told him of my American friends, your brother Hyman
among them, and, surely, I could not omit you, another heroine to hang
in his gallery of fair ladies of romance."

Rebecca shook her head, smilingly. "But I am not a heroine nor a lady
of romance," she protested.

"Scott seemed to think you were," Irving insisted. "I told him of your
beauty, your goodness--well, you can't deny them," as she raised a
protesting hand, "and your loyalty to your people. He had not finished
his novel, 'Rob Roy,' then, but he told me he was eager to write a new
romance, with the adventures of a lovely Jewess named Rebecca to form
the silver thread of the story. He has written me from time to time,"
went on Irving, as Rebecca smiled a little incredulously, "to tell me
how the work progressed. Much of the romance was dictated when Scott
lay on a couch too ill to write. He tells me that his two secretaries
grew to love the heroine, Rebecca, as much as he did, and that once
one of them grew so impatient to hear what became of her, that he
looked up from his manuscript and cried: 'That is fine, Mr. Scott--get
on--get on!'"

"And did Mr. Scott finally 'get on' and finish his book with a Jewish
heroine?" laughed Rebecca.

Irving reached toward the table and handed her a package he had placed
ther