"Tiens! Perhaps it explains your ... un-English charm? On your mother's side, I suppose?"
"Yes. She was a Maramonte. They've lived for centuries at Siena. I believe they've got a palace there a good bit older than the Tower! But I've never met my relations. My uncle is the present marquis—with two sons and a second wife. So there's no chance for me as heir—beyond what was left me by my mother."
He laughed, happily unconcerned. "I can't picture myself, somehow, the lordly owner of feudal lands. You know Siena's quite mediæval in many of its customs now. 'Il Palio,'—those weird races are still run twice a year. Every quarter of the city sends a horse to compete, and the jockeys wear historic clothes and tear round the market-place. It's a little bigger than Hanover Square and sloped on the side of a hill, so at the most dangerous angle they lay out a row of mattresses! Fact, I assure you"—he smiled. "I mean to see it myself some day. And, after the race is run, the jockey leads the winning horse, in gorgeous trappings with the banner of the victorious Quarter, right into the Cathedral! There it receives a solemn blessing and after that a feast is held in the market-place by torch light and the horse, if you please, presides—with his bin of corn—at the head of the table! Isn't it quaint? In these days of 'wireless' and Zeppelins there's something rather refreshing about it—the glamour of a fairy-tale."
"Delightful. Take me with you, Pierrot." She sent him a mocking smile over the edge of her wine-glass.
"Will you come?" McTaggart's voice was low,
The "intime" atmosphere of the place, with the magnetism of Fantine, her strange and nameless charm, were not without effect on him.
"Per'aps..." She shrugged her shoulders lightly. "If you will promise to leave behind that rather alarming British half sacred to the 'English Miss.'"
His "Scotch heart!" Whimsically he studied the proposition. It seemed just now a small item beside the beat of his other organ.
A sudden moodiness beset him. Was he never to understand himself? To be swayed with every turn of the wind at the mercy of his temperament?
For the foreign blood in his veins warred perpetually with the Scotch. It was in truth a heady mixture, typical South and typical North. With the passion of the former, its restless fiery love of beauty, were blent the caution and the strength and something vaguely religious—'dour'—tinged with a faint melancholy, the heritage with his blue eyes from a long-dead Covenanter.