'Ay,' said the poet, stretching great arms above his head, his dark eyes glowing, and his bronzed cheek flushed. 'Ay, a sweet voice! My heart leaps, and my blood sallies at its sweetness. I am a slave to such sounds. But miss will not sing often for the poor bard. I can see,' he added in a different tone, ''tis a fine lady—not a congenial, not a sympathetic soul....'
'What? Poor Ally?' said Nancy, in unfeigned surprise. 'Why, 'tis the simplest, the most unquestioning child! Sure, there's no thought of criticism in her heart towards anyone.' The poet shrugged his shoulders incredulously. He had the quick, morbid sensitiveness of the poet tribe, and already he had noted the almost intangible shrinking of Alison from his person—the hardly perceptible drawing of herself up when he pressed too near, or spoke gallantly. He put it down to the feeling of class, which he was always so suspiciously ready to detect and to resent—the shrinking of a proud miss from the peasant.
'You see, Sylvander,' Nancy went on, 'the child may be of such great service in our friendship. Her very presence is a pretext for the visits of a certain bard. Young, fair, a songstress, might not she—rather than poor Clarinda's fading charms—be thought to constitute his attraction?'
'Provided the deception hurts no one,' said the Bard rather uneasily. He had that sense of fairness which is too exclusively, it is to be feared, a masculine quality. An untethered rover in the fields of love, he never yet willingly poached, or spoiled another's sport. 'I would not hurt miss with the world,' he added.
'Take care you do not the rather hurt Clarinda with the world!' cried Nancy, shaking an admonitory finger. Passion and prudence alternately swayed the little woman at this time; her warm temperament and growing passion drove her within the sphere of danger; her love of the world and its countenance, a terror of losing caste, as a young and pretty woman in a delicate situation, held her back.
Now, as the poet rose to depart, she loaded him with cautions as to his future coming and going. She begged of him not to employ the town's messengers: they were so shifty, and getting to know her house too well; not to come, if he could avoid it, in a chair—chairs were so unusual in that poor part of the town that they caused remark; not to trouble Jean too often at the door: 'twere better he should have the key.
'See how I honour, how I trust, my Sylvander!' she said, softly. The poet pocketed the key, with, it must be admitted, a rollicking eye for so romantic a personage. He did his best, however, to look only impassioned, and not also entertained. And such apt deceivers are men, that he perfectly succeeded.
When he was gone, Alison and Nancy sat a while together by the fire, but they had singularly little to say to each other. Nancy asked a few evidently forced questions about her boy, and the expedition to Prestonpans; but her thoughts were elsewhere, and she was silent and restless.
'Thank Heaven!' she exclaimed suddenly, 'now Danny's away, Herries will not be poking his solemn face in so often as of late. 'Twould be most consumedly awkward if he did.'
And then Alison realised, with a very strange feeling of aloofness from her friend, and a peculiar sense of the unnaturalness of the situation, that she could never—no, not imaginably ever, she thought—speak to Nancy of her love, and of her lover, Herries!