“And that is not the truth, Mungo,” said Olivia, with great dignity. “I think with my father that you are telling what is not the true word,” and she said no more, but followed to the salle.
On the stairway Count Victor had trod upon the button he had drawn from the skirts of his assailant; he picked it up without a word, to keep it as a souvenir. Doom preceded him into the room, lit some candles hurriedly at the smouldering fire, and turned to offer him a chair.
“Our—our friends are gone,” said he. “You seem to have badly wounded one of them, for the others carried him bleeding to the water-side, as we have seen from his blood-marks on the rock: they have gone, as they apparently must have come, by boat. Sit down, Olivia.”
His daughter had entered. She had hurriedly coiled her hair up, and the happy carelessness of it pleased Montaiglon's eye like a picture.
Still he said nothing; he could not trust himself to speak, facing, as he fancied yet he did, a traitor.
“I see from your face you must still be dubious of me,” said Doom. He waited for no reply, but paced up and down the room excitedly, the pleats of his kilt and the thongs of his purse swinging to his movements: a handsome figure, as Mont-aiglon could not but confess. “I am still shattered at the nerve to think that I had almost taken your life there in a fool's blunder. You must wonder to see me in this—in this costume.”
He could not even yet come to his explanation, and Olivia must help him.
“What my father would tell you, if he was not in such a trouble, Count Victor, is what I did my best to let you know last night. It is just that he breaks the laws of George the king in this small affair of our Highland tartan. It is a fancy of his to be wearing it in an evening, and the bats in the chapel upstairs are too blind to know what a rebel it is that must be play-acting old days and old styles among them.”
A faint light came suddenly to Count Victor.
“Ah!” said he, “it is not, mademoiselle, that the bats alone are blind; here is a very blind Montaiglon. I implore your pardon, M. le Baron. It is good to be frank, though it is sometimes unpleasant, and I must plead guilty to an imbecile misapprehension.”