The Lost Lady of Lone | Page 9

of her question, and
regretted that she had asked it.
"Ou aye, it's just the fule talk o' thae gossips up by Ben Lone. They
behoove to say that's its na the game that draws the young laird sae
often to Ben Lone; but just Rab Cameron's handsome lass, Rose, and
she is a handsome quean as I said before; but nae 'are to mak' the young
master lose his head for a' that! Sae ye maun na beleiv' a word of it, me
young leddy," said Dame Girzie.
And she hastened to change the subject.
"Ah! what a power beauty is! It can make a prince forget his royal state,
and sue to a peasant girl," sighed Salome to herself. "I wonder--I

wonder, if there is any truth in that report? Oh, I hope there is not, for
his own sake. I wonder where he is--what he is doing? But that is no
affair of mine. I have nothing at all to do with it! I wonder if I shall
ever meet him. I wonder if he would think me very ugly? Nonsense,
what if he should? He is nothing to me. I--I do wonder if a young man
so noble in character, so handsome in person as he is, ever could like a
girl without any beauty at all, even if she--even if she--Oh, dear! what a
fool I am! I had better never have come out of the convent. I will think
no more about him," said Salome, resolutely taking up a volume of the
"Lives of the Saints," and turning to the page that related how--
"St. Rosalie, Darling of each heart and eye, From all the youth of Italy
Retired to God."
"That is the noblest love and service, after all," she said--"the noblest,
surely, because it is Divine!"
And she resolved to emulate the example of the young and beautiful
Italian virgin. She, too, would retire to God. That is, she would enter
her convent as soon as her three probationary years should be passed.
But though she so resolved to devote herself to Heaven in this
abnormal way, the natural human love that now glowed in her heart,
would not be put down by an unnatural resolve.
Days and nights passed, and she still thought of the banished heir all
day, and dreamed of him all night--the more intensely as well as purely
perhaps, because she had never looked upon his living face.
To her he was an abstract ideal.
Later in the month her father returned to Lone--on business of more
importance than that which had hurried him away.
He had only retired from one phase of public life to enter upon another.
There was to be a new Parliament. And at the solicitations of many
interested parties, and perhaps also at the promptings of his own late

ambition, Sir Lemuel Levison consented to stand for the borough of
Lone. In the absence of the young Marquis of Arondelle there was no
one to oppose him, and he was returned by an almost unanimous vote.
Early in February, Sir Lemuel Levison took his dreaming daughter and
went up to London to take his seat in the House of Commons at the
meeting of Parliament.
He engaged a sumptuously furnished house on Westbourne Terrace,
and invited a distant relative, Lady Belgrave, the childless widow of a
baronet, to come and pass the season with him and chaperone his
daughter on her entrance into society.
Lady Belgrade was sixty years old, tall, stout, fair-complexioned,
gray-haired, healthy, good-humored, and well-dressed--altogether as
commonplace and harmless a fine lady as could be found in the
fashionable world.
Salome had never seen her, scarcely ever heard of her before the day of
her arrival at Westbourne Terrace.
Salome met Lady Belgrade with courtesy and kindness, but with much
indifference.
Lady Belgrade, on her part, met her young kinswoman with critical
curiosity.
"She is not pretty, not at all pretty, and one does not like to have a plain
girl to bring out. She is not pretty, and what is worse than all, she seems
to know it. And she can only grow pretty by believing that she is so. A
girl with such a pair of eyes as hers can always get the reputation of
beauty if she can only be made to believe in herself," was Lady
Belgrade's secret comment; but--
"What beautiful eyes you have, my dear!" she said with effusion, as she
kissed Salome on both cheeks.
The girl smiled and blushed with pleasure, for this was the first time in

all her life that she had been credited with any beauty at all.
Lady Belgrade was partly right and partly wrong.
A girl with such a physique as Salome could never be pretty, never be
handsome, but,