Dick looked as if he didn’t understand, and yet did not quite like the information. Something that would have been jealousy in a more presumptuous admirer, shot through his great frame. Had he been physically a retriever, he would have put his tail between his legs.
‘I dinna like acquaintances,’ said he, looking down at her bodily a foot or so; looking up at her metaphorically any number of yards. ‘Give me friends, Mistress Seton, auld friends, an’ no too mony o’ them.’
‘You wouldn’t like this acquaintance!’ laughed the young lady, merrily, whereat her companion looked on her admiringly, as one who listens to sweet music. ‘He’s an acquaintance that would put you on your back readily, for as strong as you think yourself; he has overcome the Queen and the household and Mr Randolph and Mary Beton, and all of them but me.’
‘No,’ replied the borderer. He did not the least understand what she meant, but admired her intensely, nevertheless.
‘It’s the sickness,’[5] at last she condescended to explain, between bursts of laughter at her companion’s puzzled countenance. ‘There are but two of the Queen’s ladies fit for duty at all—Mary Carmichael and me; and she is so occupied with your chief’s kinsman, Mr Maxwell, that she couldn’t be more useless if she was ill in bed. The Court is as dull as ditch-water, and I shall have to walk up this weary hill to do everybody’s business twice a week instead of once; that is the upshot of it.’
[5] An epidemic that prevailed at the Court, answering to the indisposition which we now term influenza, and mentioned by Randolph in his letters to Cecil.
A ray of intense pleasure gleamed on her listener’s face at this announcement; but it clouded over a minute afterwards, and he asked with undisguised anxiety, ‘If there was no danger for herself?’
The girl could not but feel gratified at his obvious interest in her safety; but she laughed again, and answered, merrily—
‘Do you think nobody can be bold who is not six foot high? I fear sickness, I tell you, as little as you fear Lord Scrope, and hate it perhaps more; and yet you have the best of it, too. I had rather face death on an open moor than in closed bed-curtains. I wonder if anybody would miss me much?’ she added, more to herself than him, for the grave chord had somehow been struck in her thoughtless character.
He did not answer, and when she looked at him, his face was turned away.