With a swift tread Mark traversed the curving shore till he had left a full league between him and the spot where he had separated from Grace Fitzgerald. Then striking into a path that led inland, he followed it with undiminished speed, and with a light and confident step, that showed his familiarity with every intricate winding of his moonlit way.
How often he pressed to his adoring lips the locket of hair that secured the billet; how often he paused to read over and over again, by the light of the moon, the delicate characters traced by the pencil her fingers had guided, let each one that has loved enumerate for himself. As he went along, he could not help revolving in his mind the manner of Grace Fitzgerald, and asking himself a hundred times if she could mean anything; and when it could not be concealed from his penetrating mind that she did mean something, or affected to do so—the wish rose to his lips that Kate Bellamont had been in her place. Yet the very next moment, so contradictory is love, he congratulated himself that she was not, feeling that he should never have had the courage to meet her face to face alone, as he had met her cousin. Love surely endows his votaries with a singular union of boldness and timidity! Your lover is either an arrant coward or a lion, and sometimes he is both in one, as he happens to be in or out of his mistress's presence.
At length he came in sight of an ancient and extensive ruin in the midst of the forest, and was picking his way among the fallen fragments, along which his road wound, when he was startled by the sound of horses' feet coming from the direction of Castle More; the moment afterward, he saw, by the light of the moon, two horsemen emerge from the wood, and rapidly approach the ruin. He instinctively drew to one side of the path to escape observation, when he heard one of them utter an exclamation of surprise; both then suddenly reined up, and, from the sound of a third voice, they appeared to be holding conversation with some one they had unexpectedly encountered.
CHAPTER IV.
"Away, away my steed and I
Upon the pinions of the wind!"
Mazeppa.
"Thou false fiend, thou liest!
I do defy—deny—spurn back and scorn ye!"
"That thus a son should stand and hear
The tale of his disgrace."
Byron.