Margaret blushed, and drew herself up unconsciously. "You do not understand, Rita," she said gravely. "This was her prince, the son of her sovereign; she was a simple Scottish gentlewoman. When he was flying for his life, she was able to befriend him, and to save his life at peril of her own; but when that was over, there was no more need of her, and she went back to her home. What should she have done in France, at the king's court?"
"Even if so," muttered Rita, with the well-known shrug of her shoulders, "I would have gone, if it had been I. He should not have thrown me off like that."
Margaret raised her eyes, full of angry light, and opened her lips to speak; but instead kept silence for a moment. Then, "You do not understand," she said again, but gently; "my mother was a Scotchwoman, so I feel differently, of course. It is no matter, but I will tell you this about Miss McDonald: that when she died, years after, an old woman of seventy, she was buried in the sheet that had covered Prince Charles Stuart, that night after Culloden."
"My!" said Peggy, "it must have been awfully yellow!"
After dinner it was Rita's custom to take a siesta. She declared that she required more sleep than most people, and that without eleven hours' repose she should perish. So while she slept, Margaret and Peggy arranged flowers, or Peggy would write home, with many sighs of weariness and distress, while Margaret, sitting near her, snatched a half-hour for some enchanting book. It sometimes seemed to her more than she could bear, to be among so many fine books, and to have almost no time to read. At home, several hours were spent in reading, as a matter of course; often and often, the long, happy evening would pass without a word exchanged between her father and herself. Only, when either looked up from the book, there was always the meeting glance of love and sympathy, which made the printed page shine golden when the eyes returned to it. Here, reading was considered a singular waste of time. Rita read herself to sleep with a novel, but Peggy was entirely frank in her confession that she should not care if she never saw a book again. Even the home letters were a grievous task to her, for she never could think of anything to say. Margaret, deep in the precious pages of Froissart, it might be, would be roused by a portentous sigh, and looking up, would find Peggy champing the penhandle, and gazing at her with lack-lustre eyes.
"What's the matter now, Peg of Limavaddy?"
"I can't—think—of a single thing to say."
"Child! I thought you had so much to tell them this time. Think of that lovely drive we took yesterday; I thought you were going to tell about that. Don't you remember the sunset from the top of the long hill, and how we made believe the clouds were our fairy castles, and each said what she would do when she got there? Rita was going to organise a Sunset Dance, with ten thousand fairies in crimson and gold, and you were going to be met by a hundred thoroughbred horses, all white as snow, and were going to drive them abreast in a golden chariot; don't you remember all that? Tell them about the drive!"
"I have told them," said Peggy gloomily. "I couldn't put in all that, Margaret; it would take all day, and besides, Ma would think I was crazy."
"Do you mind my seeing what you wrote?—oh, Peggy!"