l I fall a-napping.... Heigho!
I'm yawning now." She covered her face with her fan and leaned back
against a pillar, crossing her feet. "Tell me about London," she said.
But I knew no more than she.

"I'd be a belle there," she observed. "I'd have a train o' beaux and
macaronis at my heels, I warrant you! The foppier, the more it would
please me. Think, cousin--ranks of them all a-simper, ogling me through
a hundred quizzing-glasses! Heigho! There's doubtless some deviltry in
me, as Sir Lupus says."

She yawned again, looked up at the stars, then fell to twisting her fan
with idle fingers.

"I suppose," she said, more to herself than to me, "that Sir John is now
close to the table's edge, and Colonel Claus is under it.... Hark to
their song, all off the key! But who cares?... so that they quarrel
not.... Like those twin brawlers of Glencoe, ... brooding on feuds nigh
a hundred years old.... I have no patience with a brooder, one who
treasures wrongs, ... like Walter Butler." She looked up at me.

"I warned you," she said.

"It is not easy to avoid insulting him," I replied.

"I warned you of that, too. Now you've a quarrel, and a reckoning in
prospect."

"The reckoning is far off," I retorted, ill-humoredly.

"Far off--yes. Further away than you know. You will never cross swords
with Walter Butler."

"And why not?"

"He means to use the Iroquois."

I was silent.

"For the honor of your women, you cannot fight such a man," she added,
quietly.

"I wish I had the right to protect your honor," I said, so suddenly and
so bitterly that I surprised myself.

"Have you not?" she asked, gravely. "I am your kinswoman."

"Yes, yes, I know," I muttered, and fell to plucking at the lace on my
wristbands.

The dawn's chill was in the air, the dawn's silence, too, and I saw the
calm morning star on the horizon, watching the dark world--the dark, sad
world, lying so still, so patient, under the ancient sky.

That melancholy--which is an omen, too--left me benumbed, adrift in a
sort of pained contentment which alternately soothed and troubled, so
that at moments I almost drowsed, and at moments I heard my heart
stirring, as though in dull expectancy of beatitudes undreamed of.

Dorothy, too, sat listless, pensive, and in her eyes a sombre shadow,
such as falls on children's eyes at moments, leaving their
elders silent.

Once in the false dawn a cock crowed, and the shrill, far cry left the
raw air emptier and t