‘Do you think they would?’ she proceeded, with the pertinacity of a spoiled child. ‘Stranger things have come to pass. You might be riding merrily in Liddesdale, whilst Mary Seton was lying stark and cold under the Abbey stones.’
‘It would be a dark day in Liddesdale,’ was all the answer he made; but he would not let her see his face, and his voice sounded as it had never done before.
A tinge of remorse, such as that which the urchin feels when he takes a bird’s-nest, smote almost unconsciously at the girl’s heart; yet was the sensation, though pathetic, by no means unpleasant.
She laughed and bantered him more than usual during their walk; but on that day, and indeed every day afterwards till he returned to the border, she suffered him to carry her basket; and the honest retriever, proud of his degradation, followed at her heel, with ever-increasing fidelity and devotion. The bird’s-nest was taken now, and it is no use attempting to put such articles back again; moreover, it had been thoroughly harried, emptied clean of its treasures, and all the eggs were in that one basket.
CHAPTER XII.
‘Oh! is my basnet a widow’s curch,
Or my lance a wand of the willow tree,
Or my arm a lady’s lily hand,