'Sir?'
'My tiny elves have not here deluded me? I am always afraid lest those merry little wags should be playing me some prank. But it is you who are the wicked Will o' the Wisp, that lures all others, yet never can be lured yourself! Lord Denmeath has really, then, and in sober truth, the happiness of some way belonging to you?'
'No, Sir;—you mistake me;—I never—' She left her phrase unfinished.
'Shall I relate what the prattling tell-tales have blabbed to me further? They pretend that Lord Denmeath ought himself to be your protector; but that he is so void of taste, so empty of sentiment, that he seeks to disguise, if not disown, an affinity that, with more liberal ideas, he would exult in as an honour.'
'Who talked of affinity, Sir?' cried Juliet, with quickness irrepressible.—
'Was it Lord Denmeath?—Did he name me to you?'
'Name you? Has any one named you? Indefinable, unconquerable, unfathomable Incognita! Has any one presumed to give you a human genealogy? Are you not straight descended from the clouds? without even taking the time to change yourself first into a mortal? Explain, expound, unravel to me, in soft pity—'
Juliet solemnly entreated him to forbear any further interrogatory, assuring him that all enquiry gave her pain.
'Then shall "the stars,"' cried he, '"fade away, the sun grow dim, and nature,"—like my poor old carcass!—"sink in years," ere one grain more of the favourite attribute of our general mother shall be sown in my discourse! But you, in all things marvellous! You! have you really, and bona fide, so little in your composition of our naughty mamma, as not even to desire to know in what shape appeared to me the tattling little elf, that talked to me of Lord Denmeath?'
'You have not then, Sir, seen him?'