De Bourmont colored warmly.
“It is good money earned,” he said angrily.
“And Miss Flora Mackenzie is the richest heiress in Edinburgh, too!” continued Bastien, in a bantering tone.
De Bourmont turned still more crimson. An indescribable look of haughtiness came into Lady Betty’s clear, dark gray eyes. An attorney’s daughter in Castle Street!
Bastien, conscious that he had said enough and more than enough, dropped the subject. De Bourmont turned again to Lady Betty, but found her rather cold and unresponsive, and, in some way, the ending of the little supper was not so gay as its beginning.
Next day, the ladies were presented to their Royal Highnesses. De Bourmont had been wont to see people of great merit and high birth a little frightened in the presence of very small royalties; but after seeing Lady Betty’s graceful ease and modest composure in the presence of those esteemed to be great, he laughed no more at Scottish pride.
“Faith, she acted as if she were herself only a princess of a lower degree,” he thought, and then he remembered that among all the red heads and hard features and rawboned figures he had seen at Edinburgh, he had not seen one toady—so Lady Betty was not so exceptional after all. The meeting with the Abbé de Ronceray was painful to Lady Betty. Nine years had passed since Angus Macdonald’s death, and every year, so far from wishing to know the name of his murderer, as she called his adversary, she became less willing to know it. It could not bring Angus back, and it would fill her with grief and vengeance toward some living person or dead memory. Nevertheless, by mere dint of thinking on the subject, she could not refrain from asking a few guarded questions of the Abbé. She found him not only totally uncommunicative, but from the first word he dropped she saw he did not suspect that Angus Macdonald and Lady Betty Stair were brother and sister. So Lady Betty determined to ask no more questions on the subject, and believe simply that Angus had lost his life in an honorable quarrel—for she knew him too well to suppose his death a dishonorable one. And so, without forgetting either Angus or the stout old Highlander, her father, Lady Betty chose to think on their lives rather than their deaths, and was tolerably happy herself, and helped many other persons to be happy.
De Bourmont devoted himself pretty assiduously from the first to Lady Betty, and tried hard to make her believe he had never given another thought to the lawyer’s daughter in Castle Street. Of course he did give her a thought—De Bourmont was not the man to give up one lovely girl because there was another lovely girl in the case. But after he knew Lady Betty he merely fluttered in Castle Street because Flora Mackenzie was beautiful, and was cold, and there was a spice of adventure in the affair.
Soon, he and Lady Betty began to talk confidentially in the long hours they spent together, waiting in the gloomy corridors or the dreary anterooms for their Royal Highnesses to walk, to drive, to play cards—or to say they would do nothing at all. De Bourmont was very restless, and Lady Betty saw plainly enough that the Comte d’Artois would soon have to get a new gentleman-in-waiting. With this she keenly sympathized. Her father had been “out in the forty-five” and her grandfather in “the fifteen,” and for a man’s country to be at war and that man not in the thick of the fight, seemed to her the most terrible of hardships. In her heart, she felt that De Bourmont would not be wholly a man until he cast off those false principles of honor which kept him a gentleman-in-waiting when he should have been a captain of the line, and in a subtle way, peculiarly her own, she communicated this to him without giving offence.
To De Bourmont, who was used to the artificial great ladies of France, this simple, daring, spirited Scotch girl was a revelation. She taught him the Highland dances, and actually persuaded the head of the family to let him wear the tartan. To carry this out, though, cost as much diplomacy as to get a dukedom, so De Bourmont feelingly complained. But he learned to dance these national dances beautifully, and his strong, lithe figure never looked handsomer than when, in a kilt and bonnet, he danced the sword dance before the royal people and their suite in the grand drawing-room at Holyrood.