CHAPTER XXIII.
"The shaken tree grows firmer at the roots;
So love grows firmer for some blasts of doubt."
It was two years or more since the Oaks had suffered the temporary loss of its master and mistress, yet they had not returned; they still lingered on foreign shores, and Mrs. Murray, who had been left at the head of household affairs, looked in vain for news of their home-coming.
She now and then received a short business letter from Mr. Dinsmore or of directions from Rose; or a longer one from the latter or Elsie, giving entertaining bits of travel, etc.; and occasionally Adelaide would ride over from Roselands and delight the old housekeeper's heart by reading aloud a lively gossipy epistle one or the other had addressed to her.
How charmed and interested were both reader and listener; especially when they came upon one of Rose's graphic accounts of their presentation at court—in London, Paris, Vienna, or St. Petersburg—wherein she gave a minute description of Elsie's dress and appearance, and dwelt with motherly pride and delight upon the admiration everywhere accorded to the beauty and sweetness of the lovely American heiress.
It was a great gratification to Adelaide's pride in her niece to learn that more than one coronet had been laid at her feet; yet she was not sorry to hear that they had been rejected with the gentle firmness which she knew Elsie was capable of exercising.
"But what more could the bairn or her father desire? would he keep the sweet lassie single a' her days, Miss Dinsmore?" asked Mrs. Murray when Adelaide told her this.
"No," was the smiling rejoinder; "I know he would be very loath to resign her; but this is Elsie's own doing. She says the man for whom she would be willing to give up her native land must be very dear indeed, that her hand shall never be given without her heart, and that it still belongs more to her father than to any one else."
"Ah, that is well, Miss Adelaide. I hae been sorely troubled aboot my sweet bairn. I never breathed the thoct to ither mortal ear, but when they cam hame frae that summer in the North, she was na the blythe young thing she had been; and there was that in the wistfu' and hungered look o' her sweet een—when she turned them whiles upon her father—that made me think some ane he didna approve had won the innocent young heart."
"Ah, well, Mrs. Murray, whatever may have been amiss then, is all over now. My sister writes me that Elsie seems very happy, and as devotedly attached to her father as ever, insisting that no one ever can be so dear to her as he."