I turned on him, opening my eyes wide. "Basil spare me!" I echoed scornfully. "I'm not his princess, even if you don't want me for yours."
"Oh, here he comes!" I whispered, shrill as a cricket. "Take me to see _your_ things, quickly."
So we ran away from Basil, and I had one of the happiest hours I have ever lived through; although the sight of Sir Walter's neat clothes in the glass case--the thick-soled boots, the broad-brimmed hat that covered his thoughts, the coat that covered his heart--brought tears to my eyes.
Next best, I liked the bit of Queen Mary's dress, the pocket-book worked by Flora MacDonald, Prince Charlie's "Quaich"--the cup with the glass bottom to guard the drinker against surprises--the ivory miniatures Sir Walter and his French bride exchanged, and the Rob Roy relics. Perhaps it is odd, but they were the very things Sir S. had remembered most affectionately. Last of all he showed me a toadstone amulet set in silver, a charm to prevent and ward off the spells of fairies. "If I could have had a thing like this to carry about with me in my motor-car," he said, "I should perhaps have been safe. But it's too late now."
He smiled at me with that whimsical yet kind smile which is the only sort he ever gives me since Mrs. West and Basil and the boys came. Before their day, there was a different look in his eyes. I can't tell what that difference was, but I liked the old look a thousand times better than the new, which makes me feel I may as well go into a convent. Not that I intend to do so!
Just then Basil came to say that his sister and the Vannecks were going, as Aline was tired; and would Sir S. tell her what time we were to see the Abbey. Basil and I were left together--quite as usual, lately. He made some rather nice poetical remarks about the house at Abbotsford: how marvellously it expressed the personality and tendency of Sir Walter's mind; and how it seemed to him that here was the true heart of Scotland embalmed in spices and laid in a shrine, just as Robert Bruce's heart lies at Melrose. I hardly listened, though, for I was wondering so much what Sir S. would have gone on to say about the amulet if Basil had let us alone a minute longer. But fairy fancies were in the air, in one form or other. As we walked up the narrow path which would bring us to the motor, Basil told me a dream he'd had the night before. "I thought," he said, "that I was a humble reincarnation of Thomas Ecildoune--Thomas the Rhymer--and that I was walking in the Rhymer's Glen--it isn't far out of this neighbourhood, you know--when a Vision in a magic motor-car came sprinting down the steep curve of a rainbow. In front of my feet, the Vision contrived to stop the car, or in another second it would have run over me. Out she stepped and announced that she was the Queen of the Fays, whom I would remember meeting before in my last incarnation, in the same place. Strange to say, she looked exactly like you--and I must add, she acted exactly as you do."