In truth, Ratcliffe was beginning to suspect that he had overrated Harry Rockhurst’s influence. If he knew women, his fair cousin, below yonder, had given no real response. He had caught the note of indulgence which the wooer himself was too inexperienced to mark in her accents. True, there might lurk some danger even in this; yet not such as to call for indiscreet interference. He smiled sardonically as the lover’s pleading rose passionately in the air.
“Give me hope, Diana—one word. Ah, madam, give me hope!”
But Mistress Harcourt rose and disengaged herself with some decision from the young man’s grasp.
“Stay, Master Rockhurst, how can I listen to you? In truth, dear lad, you are over young to dream of such matters yet. Why, and what would my Lord Rockhurst say, could he but hear? Indeed, Harry, ’tis undutiful of you, without your noble father’s sanction—I dare swear without even his knowledge.”
“My father!” cried the boy, as if the words had struck him. “Alack,” he added despairingly, “this sudden departure, upon which you have resolved, has thwarted all my plans. Yet, madam, you are wrong; my father does know. I have writ him all my heart.”
Diana turned the pale, fresh beauty of her face full in surprise upon the speaker.
“Aye—have you, indeed?” cried she. “And what says his lordship?”
The youth, emboldened afresh, pressed forward; but she kept him sweetly at arm’s length, menacing him with her posy.
“He has not answered yet—could not have answered yet, madam. Natheless, I am his only child; he loves me: there can be but one answer. Diana, if that be all that stands between us—”
“Nay,” she teased, “and shall I tell you your father’s answer? ‘Ah, Harry’ (will his lordship say), ‘have I kept thee secluded in the country, that thou mightest grow strong in health and virtuous in mind’—for these, we are told, are my Lord Rockhurst’s reasons—‘and hast seen a young gentlewoman for the first time? Pack up, lad, pack and ride with me to London town; and in a week will’t have forgotten her very existence!’”