And had he given all this trouble to this perfect creature merely that he should look at a tree? and was he to say some ordinary thing about an ordinary elm to tell her how grateful he was?

“It is like a dream to me,” he said, honestly enough, “since I came to London.  You seem always to have sunlight and plenty of fine trees and hot-house flowers.  But I suppose you have winter, like the rest us?”

“Or we should very soon tire of all this, beautiful as it is,” said she; and she looked rather wistfully out on the broad, still gardens.  “For my part, I should very soon tire of it.  I should think there was more excitement in the wild storms and the dark nights of the north; there must be a strange fascination in the short winter days among the mountains, and the long winter nights by the side of the Atlantic.”

He looked at her and smiled.  That fierce fascination he knew something of:  how had she guessed at it?  And as for her talking as if she herself would gladly brave these storms—­was it for a foam-bell to brave a storm? was it for a rose-leaf to meet the driving rains of Ben-an-Sloich?

“Shall we go back now?” said she; and as she turned to lead the way he could not fail to remark how shapely her neck was, for her rich golden-brown hair was loosely gathered up behind.

But just at this moment Mrs. Ross made her appearance.

“Come,” said she, “we shall have a chat all to ourselves; and you will tell me, Sir Keith, what you have seen since you came to London, and what has struck you most.  And you must stay with us, Gertrude.  Perhaps Sir Keith will be so kind as to freeze your blood with another horrible story about the Highlanders.  I am only a poor southerner, and had to get up my legends from books.  But this wicked girl, Sir Keith, delights as much in stories of bloodshed as a schoolboy does.”

“You will not believe her,” said Miss White, in that low-toned, gravely sincere voice of hers, while a faint shell-like pink suffused her face.  “It was only that we were talking of the highlands, because we understood you were coming; and Mrs. Ross was trying to make out”—­and here a spice of proud mischief came into her ordinarily calm eyes—­“she was trying to make out that you must be a very terrible and dangerous person, who would probably murder us all if we were not civil to you.”

“Well, you know, Sir Keith,” said Mrs. Ross, apologetically, “you acknowledge yourself that you Macleods were a very dreadful lot of people at one time.  What a shame it was to track the poor fellow over the snow, and then deliberately to put brushwood in front of the cave, and then suffocate whole two hundred persons at once!”

“Oh yes, no doubt!” said he; “but the Macdonalds were asked first to give up the men that had bound the Macleods hand and foot and set them adrift in the boat, and they would not do it.  And if the Macdonalds had got the Macleods into a cave, they would have suffocated them too.  The Macdonalds began it.”