Page:Stevenson and Quiller-Couch - St Ives .djvu/458

 "He has the knack. But if you expect me to like him any the better for it"

"Major Chevenix," put in Miss Gilchrist, in her most rhadamanthine voice, "always sets me in mind of a pair of scissors." She opened and shut the pair in her hand, and I had to confess that the stiff and sawing action was admirably illustrative.

"But I wish to heaven, madam," thought I, "you could have chosen another simile!" In the evening of that beatific day I walked back to Edinburgh by some aerial and rose-clouded path not indicated on the maps. It led somehow to my lodgings, and my feet touched earth when the door was opened to me by Bethiah McRankine.

"But where is Rowley?" I asked a moment later, looking round my sitting-room.

Mrs. McRankine smiled sardonically. "Him? He came back rolling his eyes so that I guessed him to be troubled in the wind. And he's in bed this hour past with a spoonful of peppermint in his little wame."

And here I may ring down the curtain upon the adventures of Anne de Saint-Yves.

Flora and I were married early in June, and had been settled for little over six months amid the splendours of Amersham Place when news came of the Emperor's escape from Elba. Throughout the consequent alarums and excursions of the Hundred Days (as M. de Chambord named them for us) I have to confess that the Vicomte Anne sat still and warmed his hands at the domestic hearth. To be sure, Napoleon had been my master, and I had no love for the cocarde blanche. But here was I, an Englishman, already in legal but inaccurate phrase, a "naturalised"