Almond, Wild Almond. D. K. Broster

have the honour to name myself to your Royal Highness—the Vicomte de Lancize, of Dauphin-Dragons, aide-de-camp to the Comte de Saxe.”

      “Aide-de-camp to the Comte de Saxe!” exclaimed the Prince, his face lighting up. “Che buona ventura! Monsieur de Lancize, will you do me a favour?”

      “It will be for me a favour to receive your commands, mon prince!”

      “Merci, monsieur. Then I pray you to go and enquire of M. de Saxe—he is lodged at the Intendance de la Marine, is he not—whether he will receive me?”

      The Vicomte de Lancize was not expecting this.

      “To-night, monseigneur?” he asked, hesitating.

      “Yes, to-night,” returned the Prince firmly. “It is imperative that I should learn from his own lips what are his intentions, his instructions from Paris. ’Tis with that purpose that I have come from Gravelines. How can I continue to remain there inactive, hearing of disasters to the fleet, but ignorant of their extent and their consequences! I propose to stay awhile with Mr. Maclean, if he permits——”

      “Your Royal Highness!” ejaculated Ranald, somewhat overwhelmed.

      “—while Mr. Malloch goes to ask whether M. de Saxe will receive me.” He turned to Ranald. “Mr. Malloch conceived the idea of asking a brief hospitality for me, Mr. Maclean, from something which Lord Keith let fall about your having no other acquaintances in Dunkirk, so that my presence was unlikely to be noised abroad.—You see, Monsieur de Lancize, that I am desirous of embarrassing M. de Saxe as little as may be!”

      That was quite possible, but he was embarrassing M. de Saxe’s aide-de-camp a good deal, and all because that young gentleman knew too much. The last thing the Lieutenant-General of King Louis’ forces would do was to receive the Prince of Wales now.

      “Monseigneur,” he said, with a shade of deprecation, “I would willingly do your Royal Highness’s behest, but——”

      “But you conceive that I shall ask in vain?” finished Charles Edward, his brown eyes flashing. “Is that what you wish to convey?”

      “I think, monseigneur,” said the young Frenchman, “that your Royal Highness—if I may venture to say so with the greatest deference—would do better not to make the request. The Comte de Saxe is entirely devoted to your Royal Highness’s interests, but, for that very reason, he may think those interests are better served——”

      “By keeping me waiting at his door?” broke in the Prince hotly. “I’ll not believe it! If you prefer not to escort Mr. Malloch, he shall seek M. de Saxe alone—or, per Dio, I myself will go in person and knock at his door in the Intendance!”

      “No, no, your Royal Highness!” exclaimed all three men together, and Balhaldie, shocked, but a little, too, in the tone of one expostulating with a mutinous child, said: “We agreed, sir, that it would be totally unbecoming for you even to remain in the coach outside the Intendance while I approached the Comte de Saxe. Do you stay here with Mr. Maclean, as we devised; then, should M. de Saxe feel unable to receive you, no one need know that you ever came to Dunkirk to-night.”

      “Indeed, your Royal Highness,” said Ranald Maclean earnestly, “that is the better way, unworthy though my poor room be to shelter you.”

      As for the Vicomte de Lancize (who was aware that whether M. de Saxe agreed to receive the Prince or no, the result, as far as the expedition was concerned, would be exactly the same, and who sincerely wished that the Prince had not taken this step, bound to end in his discomfiture), he hastened to declare that he would conduct M. Malloch to the presence of the lieutenant-general, assured the Prince of Wales of his respectful devotion, asked leave to kiss his hand, and on that left the room to which the notary’s loose guttering had conducted him, and drove off with Mr. MacGregor of Balhaldie in the waiting coach.

      So Ranald Maclean found himself alone with that impetuous, fascinating young man of four-and-twenty over whose bright head hovered the shadow of a crown made more visionary still by the double tempest, and (though neither of them, naturally, knew this) by those instructions from Versailles, which lay upon the ink-bespattered inlay of the table in the Intendance. It was a half-hour which the Highlander was to remember all his life.

      “Cruel, cruel!” the Prince would reiterate, swinging round the room. “Just when all looked so promising—weather of this violence! It was more than flesh and blood could stand, to wait like a stock, sixteen miles away at Gravelines! God knows I have done enough of it already! . . . Do you think, Mr. Maclean, that M. de Saxe will see me? He must, he must! I’ll not take ‘no.’ ’Tis absurd to keep up any further this farce of concealing my presence in the neighbourhood, of announcing another destination for the transports!” Then he would fling himself down in a chair, toss off another glass of Ranald’s rapidly dwindling claret, and talk of his royal father’s gratification when Balhaldie had arrived in Rome in mid-December with news of the impending expedition, and of his own dash in January incognito from Rome to Genoa and Antibes and thence across France. Nor did he omit to enquire of Ranald’s own circumstances.

      “And so, Mr. Maclean, it was chance which brought you here at this juncture? You were on your way back to the island of Askay from the wine country of the south-west? Then surely a vessel of the Bordeaux and Glasgow wine trade had served your purpose better?”

      “My uncle at Girolac,” explained Ranald, “not only wished to send a greeting by me to his old friend Mr. Alexander Robertson of Struan in Perthshire, whose name will be familiar to your Royal Highness, but had some business which he was anxious to transact through my agency at Lille. ’Twas for those two reasons that I chose Dunkirk as my port of departure, all ignorant of what was toward there—and of what an opportunity was to be given me to put my sword at your Royal Highness’s service.”

      A fresh blast beat screaming against the little casement. “Your sword, sir, might as well be . . . at the bottom of the sea!” replied the Prince gloomily, glancing towards the window. “Heaven itself arms against me, it is clear.” He poured himself out another glass of claret. “But I will not bow my head to Fate! Seeing that King Louis has espoused my father’s cause—and after all the Comte de Saxe, great soldier though he be, is but an instrument in his hand—even if the transports are too badly damaged for so large a body of men to be sent to England at the moment, he will despatch them later. He could not allow such great preparations to issue in nothing! And as for M. de Saxe himself, I am assured by the tone of his letters to me that he is as devoted to my interests as his aide-de-camp has just asserted. . . . I have finished your wine, I declare, Mr. Maclean. I apologise! But we will yet crack a bottle together in Scotland, and laugh at the remembrance of this dismal night!”

      “Indeed, sir, I hope so with all my heart,” said Ranald.

      “You perhaps know,” went on the Prince, twirling round the empty wine-glass as he sat there, “that there was earlier some talk—and I believe the Earl Marischal himself was one of those who gave it credence—of a separate expedition to Scotland. That is abandoned now; the descent will take place in the south-east of England. But conceive, Mr. Maclean, that it was not until quite recently that I was made aware of the fact that Admiral Norris had slipped away from Portsmouth, where M. de Roquefeuil had orders to blockade him, into the Downs, where, as I need hardly point out to you, he may be infinitely dangerous.”

      “I had not heard that, your Royal Highness,” said Ranald in a tone of concern. “Yet perhaps the stormy weather may have affected his fleet also, and——” He broke off, listened a second, and then sprang to his feet.

      “Yes,” said the Prince, imitating him, “it is the coach; I hear it, too.”

      Ranald hurried out to the door of the house and opened it. Somewhat to his surprise he saw a figure in uniform swing out from its interior and, before the lackey could dismount to do it, let down the step for Mr. Malloch. A good sign, surely, that the Comte de Saxe’s elegant aide-de-camp should return and show such politeness to the Prince’s envoy.

      The two passed him so quickly, without word or look, that he