'Is it to go down in the annals of our family?'
'I hope so.'
"And how about all the Dead Sea fruit, the blackness of Gehenna, your firmness, and all that?'
'Silence, you young dog!'
And merrily laughed Dolores as she ran her white fingers over the piano, and sang a verse of the song that had now become so familiar to her:
'The love that I have chosen
Is to my heart's content;
The salt sea will be frozen,
Before that I repent.
Repent it will I never,
Until the day I dee,
Though the Lowlands o' Holland
Have parted my love and me.'
'And your home is Scotland—the home to which you may take me, is it like this?' asked the Countess softly of the General, as they sat in the recess of a window; and from the question it may be safely gathered that events had progressed rapidly between them.
'Like this!' exclaimed the General; 'you must see it for yourself to know the difference,' he added, as his eye swept the dull, dead flat of the Dutch landscape—flat as the flattest part of England.
Then he laughed as he thought of Thominean overshadowed by the majestic Ochills, the deep glens of which, with their solemn shadows and silence, are calculated to fill the soul at times with a species of poetic or melancholy ecstasy; the grey precipices past which the river rushes to Loch Leven, and the old mansion on its rock—half chateau and half fortress—of which Mercedes would some day be chatelaine.
But soon after all this, a shock awaited the General, when an orderly dragoon placed in his hand a large official packet addressed to himself, and sealed with the official seal of the Dutch Republic.