tion of the setting sun. Then the radiance gave place to a grin of self-satisfaction, as of a boy who saw his way to a capital joke. The dignified pedestrian cast a conscious look about him, as if to make quite certain that he was not observed. Next balancing himself on tiptoe like an elderly faun who had latterly fallen back upon looking on at the forest-dances, he stepped softly forward, as if treading among sword-blades, and his hand had come down on the dreamer's shoulder.
When a gentleman long past middle life indulges in something like a practical joke, he deserves to pay the penalty. Moray cursed his burst of boyishness from the bottom of his heart when he saw his daughter spring up with streaming eyes, start back, and turn paler if possible than before. In her state of exaltation, and with the dash of superstition in her Highland blood, she may have fancied for the moment that she saw the Doppelganger of the parent whose death or sufferings she had just been bemoaning. Grace had never fainted in her life; but now she might have yielded to the weakness and sunk down, had she not been caught in a pair of strong arms. The firm grasp did more to bring her to herself than the strongest smelling-salts or sal-volatile. Like a sensible girl as she was, she called her courage to her aid, and dismissed her terrors with her idle dreams. Five minutes more, and she was the Grace who had been more or less present to him, sleeping and waking, in restless nights on the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, as in Pullman cars between Brindisi and Paris.
"After all," he exclaimed, as they stopped for about the twentieth time in their slow saunter towards the hotel, after exchanging the fullest explanations for mutual affectionate reproaches – "after all, my penitence is already almost a thing of the past, and I hardly regret the boyish trick I played you."
"Then I am sure you ought to repent it, sir," she answered, lightly;" and you must not begin by taking advantage of my forgiving disposition."
"No, I don't think I regret it," he went on reflectively, speaking rather to himself than to her, as he returned the warm pressure of her fingers. "You see I hoped, indeed I knew, that you cared about me; but we had been so far apart and for so long. It would have been only natural had you felt nothing much warmer than friendship for a prodigal father who must have seemed strangely neglectful. Now I know better, and for the future we understand each other."
"I should think so, indeed; as if any understanding had been necessary! A prodigal father! and neglectful! What of the many letters I missed so much, that, in missing them, for the first time you made me miserable? not to speak of the presents that fell in showers on me as on Madame Robineau and dear aunt Venables. Why, sir, do you know, we always regarded you as something between the Good Genius who keeps the keys of enchanted treasure-chambers, and the mighty men of the East who never travelled without spices and apes and peacocks."
Miss Moray's quotations had got rather mixed, between the Magi and King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. But then she was talking volubly for talking's sake, in case her feelings should again get the better of her; and they were standing full in sight of the hotel windows – for which reason she did not answer her father with an embrace, which was the kind of coin
