Yet Alison, for some reason, gave the new-comer the briefest glance now, though it was a sweet one enough; then her eyes wandered away again. The two Grants, evidently thinking their cause hopeless, took themselves off.
“Alison, here is your cavalier come to claim you,” said her father from his corner.
“Alison has not a look or a thought to give to me nowadays,” observed Ewen, looking at his love from behind, at the back of her white neck, where the sacque fell in imposing folds from the square of the bodice, and where two little unruly tendrils of hair, having shaken off their powder, were beginning to show their true colour. “Like the rest of the ladies, she has eyes only for the Prince. ’Tis pity I am not a Whig, for then she might pay me some attention, if only in order to convert me.”
At that Alison turned round, laughing.
“Well, sir,” she said, looking him up and down, “your costume, I vow, is almost Whiggish. In those clothes, and without a scrap of tartan upon you, you might be an Englishman!”
“Or a Frenchman,” suggested her father from his corner.
But this accusation Alison repudiated somewhat indignantly. “No; Frenchmen are all little men!” Yet, having lived so much in France, she must have known better.
“No one could call Ardroy little, I admit,” agreed Mr. Grant. “And he has not the French physiognomy. But in that dress he has quite the French air.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Ewen, bowing, “since I suppose I am to take that as a compliment.”
“There are some tall fellows enough in my regiment,” declared Hector Grant, drawing up his slim and active figure. “For my part, I’ve no ambition to attain the height of a pine tree. Alison, is it customary in Scotland, think you, for a brother to lead out his sister?”