their first acquaintance. And with good reason, for, as he gratefully remarked, "On ne pourrait pas être plus généreux." The mighty man of the East had been lavish of his gifts to the "temple" in which the worthy pastor ministered, and he had made Madame Robineau magnificent offers to induce her to devote herself for a month to his daughter. The weather was becoming too hot to make Pau a desirable place of residence; and it was arranged that Grace was to pass a month under Madame's wing between the Baths in the mountains and Biarritz.
"Why don't you take me with you?" she demanded, not unnaturally. "I thought it was agreed that we were to be inseparable for the future."
"So I hope we shall be, my dear – till ––"
"Till when?"
"Well, till it pleases you to change your name, Miss Moray, which seems a contingency we are both bound to contemplate."
Miss Moray laughed, and vowed eternal constancy or celibacy with a semi-comic seriousness that by no means carried conviction. With all her filial love, it was quite in her mind to give her father a rival sooner or later. Then she returned to the point in dispute, and pressed her company with a pleading eloquence that, as she said, should have touched a heart of stone. But her father was obdurate, for reasons best known to himself, and defended his resolution with flattering sophistries.
"Were it not that we were to be so soon reunited, my dear, nothing would induce me to leave you. But you will know some time, that few things are so enjoyable in life as dallying in anticipation with pleasures that seem certainties. Not that I have not carried that too far occasionally. I have sat looking at a basket of mangosteens in sultry weather, till the moment had gone by when they could be eaten in perfection. I have watched the tigress playing with her cubs in the jungle, till something suddenly scared her, and I missed the shot."
"Your instances tell against your argument, and your honesty is too much for you," his daughter rejoined, very pertinently. But there was no shaking his fixed determination, so she could only sigh and resign herself.
After all, what had much influenced his decision was his impatience to have done with the past and begin afresh with the future. Grace in England would have fettered his movements; he would always have been dissipating with her or dangling after her. As it was, he went to work indefatigably to finish the winding up of his Eastern affairs and put everything in train. He sought satisfactory investments for his capital; he made a variety of indispensable purchases, buying horses and hill-carriages, and new batteries of guns; he sent upholsterers to set Glenconan in order, and engaged a suitable staff of servants. When the princess came down to her hereditary domains, she should find everything in tolerable order. He had thought of buying a house in town, and of having Glenconan entirely furnished and decorated. But the latter feat was almost impossible in the time, even had he given carte blanche à la Monte Christo; and he knew, besides, that if he wished to pay Grace a compliment and give her pleasure, he must leave everything to her taste, and throw the troubles of shopping on her shoulders. "What is fun to her would be misery to me," remarked this excellent parent,
