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“I’ll trouble you to put that back,” said the consul quietly, without turning round. The gillie slid a quick glance towards the door, but the consul was before him. “I don’t think THAT was left by your master,” he said in an ostentatiously calm voice, for he was conscious of an absurd and inexplicable tumult in his blood, “and perhaps you’d better put it back.”

The man looked at the flower with an attention that might have been merely ostentatious, and replaced it in the glass.

“A thocht it was hiss.”

“And I think it isn’t,” said the consul, opening the door.

Yet when the man had passed out he was by no means certain that the flower was not Kilcraithie’s. He was even conscious that if the young Laird had approached him with a reasonable explanation or appeal he would have yielded it up. Yet here he was–looking angrily pale in the glass, his eyes darker than they should be, and with an unmistakable instinct to do battle for this idiotic gage! Was there some morbid disturbance in the air that was affecting him as it had Kilcraithie? He tried to laugh, but catching sight of its sardonic reflection in the glass became grave again. He wondered if the gillie had been really looking for anything his master had left–he had certainly TAKEN nothing. He opened one or two of the drawers, and found only a woman’s tortoiseshell hairpin–overlooked by the footman when he had emptied them for the consul’s clothes. It had been probably forgotten by some fair and previous tenant to Kilcraithie. The consul looked at his watch–it was time to go down. He grimly pinned the fateful flower in his buttonhole, and half-defiantly descended to the drawing-room.

Here, however, he was inclined to relax when, from a group of pretty women, the bright gray eyes of Mrs. MacSpadden caught his, were suddenly diverted to the lapel of his coat, and then leaped up to his again with a sparkle of mischief. But the guests were already pairing off in dinner couples, and as they passed out of the room, he saw that she was on the arm of Kilcraithie. Yet, as she passed him, she audaciously turned her head, and in a mischievous affectation of jealous reproach, murmured:–

“So soon!”

At dinner she was too far removed for any conversation with him, although from his seat by his hostess he could plainly see her saucy profile midway up the table. But, to his surprise, her companion, Kilcraithie, did not seem to be responding to her gayety. By turns abstracted and feverish, his glances occasionally wandered towards the end of the table where the consul was sitting. For a few moments he believed that the affair of the flower, combined, perhaps, with the overhearing of Mrs. MacSpadden’s mischievous sentence, rankled in the Laird’s barbaric soul. But he became presently aware that Kilcraithie’s eyes eventually rested upon a quiet-looking blonde near the hostess. Yet the lady not only did not seem to be aware of it, but her face was more often turned towards the consul, and their eyes had once or twice met. He had been struck by the fact that they were half-veiled but singularly unimpassioned eyes, with a certain expression of cold wonderment and criticism quite inconsistent with their veiling. Nor was he surprised when, after a preliminary whispering over the plates, his hostess presented him. The lady was the young wife of the middle-aged dignitary who, seated further down the table, opposite Mrs. MacSpadden, was apparently enjoying that lady’s wildest levities. The consul bowed, the lady leaned a little forward.

“We were saying what a lovely rose you had.”

The consul’s inward response was “Hang that flower!” His outward expression was the modest query:–

“Is it SO peculiar?”

“No; but it’s very pretty. Would you allow me to see it?”

Disengaging the flower from his buttonhole he handed it to her. Oddly enough, it seemed to him that half the table was watching and listening to them. Suddenly the lady uttered a little cry. “Dear me! it’s full of thorns; of course you picked and arranged it yourself, for any lady would have wrapped something around the stalk!”