“If there is one in the world half so handsome as my father—yes,” she would answer merrily, nestling more fondly in the General’s breast, till he rose and put her off with laughing confusion.
“Away! away!” he would cry in pretended annoyance. “You make my grey hairs ridiculous.”
“Where are they?” she would say, running her white fingers over his head and daintily refastening the ribbon of that antiquated queue that made him always look the chevalier. She treated him, in all, less like a father than a lover, exceedingly proud of him, untiring of his countless tales of campaign and court, uplifted marvellously with his ambitious dreams of State preferment. For General Turner was but passing the time in Maam till by favour promised a foreign office was found for him elsewhere.
“And when the office comes,” said he, “then I leave my girl. It is the one thing that sobers me.”
“Not here! not here!” she cried, alarm in eye and tone. So he found, for the first time, her impatience with the quiet of Maam. He was, for a little, dumb with regret that this should be her feeling.
“Where better, where safer, my dear?” he asked.
“Come up to the bow-window.” And he led her where she could see their native glen from end to end.
In the farm-towns the cots were displayed; smoke rose from their chimneys in the silent air, grey blue banners of peace. “Bide at home, my dear,” said he softly, “bide at home and rest. I thought you would have been glad to be back from towns among our own kindly people in the land your very heart-blood sprang from. Quiet, do you say? True, true,” and still he surveyed the valley himself with solemn eyes. “But there is content here, and every hearth there would make you welcome if it was only for your name, even if the world was against you.”
She saw the reapers in the fields, heard their shearing songs that are sung for cheer, but somehow in this land are all imbued with melancholy. Loud, loud against that sorrow of the brooding glen rose up in her remembrance the thoughtless clamour of the lowland world, and she shivered, as one who looks from the window of a well-warmed room upon a night of storm. Her father put an arm about her waist. “Is it not homely?” said he, dreading her reply. “I can bear it—with you,” she answered pitifully. “But if you go abroad, it would kill me. I must have something that is not here; I must have youth and life—and—life.”
“At your age I would not have given Maam and the glen about it for my share of Paradise.”—“But now?” said she.