A silence followed; not even he, so versed in all the evidence of love or coquetry, could have seen a quiver to betray her even if he had thought to look for it.
“I am the one,” said she at length, “who will wish you well in that; but after her—after this—this lady—what is it that comes closest?”
“What but my country!” cried he, with a surging sudden memory of France.
“To be sure!” she acquiesced, “your country! I am not wondering at that. And ours is the closest to the core of cores in us that have not perhaps so kind a country as yours, but still must love it when it is most cruel. We are like the folks I have read of—they were the Greeks who travelled so far among other clans upon the trade of war, and bound to burst in tears when they came after strange hills and glens to the sight of the same sea that washed the country of their infancy. 'Tha-latta!'—was it not that they cried? When I read the story first in school in Edinburgh, I cried, myself, 'Lochfinne!' and thought I heard the tide rumbling upon this same rock. It is for that; it is because we must be leaving here my father is sad.”
Here indeed was news
“Leaving!” said Count Victor in astonishment.
“It is so. My father has been robbed; his people have been foolish; it is not a new thing in the Highlands of Scotland, Count Victor. You must not be thinking him a churl to be moping and leaving you to my poor entertainment, for it is ill to keep the pipes in tune when one is drying tears.”
“Where will you go?” asked Count Victor, disturbed at the tidings and the distress she so bravely struggled to conceal.
“Where? indeed!” said Olivia. “That I cannot tell you yet. But the world is wide, and it is strange if there is any spot of it where we cannot find some of our own Gaelic people who have been flitting for a generation, taking the world for their pillow. What is it that shall not come to an end? My sorrow! the story on our door down there has been preparing me for this since ever I was a bairn. My great-great-grandfather was the wise man and the far-seeing when he carved it there—'Man, Behauld the End of All, Be nocht Wiser than the Hiest. Hope in God!'” She struggled courageously with her tears that could not wholly be restrained, and there and then he could have gathered her into his arms. But he must keep himself in bounds and twist the fringes of her shawl.
“Ah, Olivia,” said he, “you will die for the sight of home.”