"I would willingly become apprentice to the meanest cobbler, to be suffered to take the measure of that tiny foot, and fit it with a shoe," said the youth, with gallantry.
The maiden laughed, and, unwilling to betray the feeling his words had created, said, "Do be quick, Lord Robert; my bow is not yet strung with our foolish idling here, and I shall be too late for the lists."
As she spoke she grasped her bow firmly in the middle, and extending her hand, containing the string terminating with a loop, to the upper limb, she pulled smartly upward, pressing the limb downward at the same time with her left wrist, and skilfully and accurately carried the eye of the bow-string into the nock. Her bow, like those of her companions, was five feet in length, neatly made of dark wood highly polished, and rounded on the inner side to increase its power in shooting.
"Well and featly done! That's a tough yew, and a man's strength could not have better done what your little fingers, with skill to guide them, I have just seen do. You were an apt pupil, young mistress, and do honour to old Dermot's lessons."
Kate Bellamont turned and saw the old forester close at her side. "If I have any skill, good Cormac," she said, "I do owe it all to your kind teaching; and if I win the arrow this day, you shall have it as a birthday gift from me, to wear in your bonnet instead of your pipe."
The forester lifted his bonnet with a gratified air, mingled with respect, at this expression of kindness from his lovely young mistress, and said,
"I know you would give Cormac, sweet lady, even the fair white plume that graces your brow if you thought it would gratify the old man. God bless you, noble child; may you live to see many such bright birthdays as this!" The rough huntsman brushed a tear from his eyes as he spoke; for the experience of years had told him that clouds would obscure the bright sky of her young hopes, and that each returning birthday might be but a sad waymark to denote the slow passage of a life of sorrow and trial. "The countess has bid me come and see if you need my aid in fitting your shafts, that you delay."
"No, no, Cormac," said the maiden, blushing; but directly she cried, "Yes, you can help me. I am undecided whether to shoot an arrow that tapers from the head to the feathers, or from the feathers to the head, or from the middle both ways."
"What says Master Robert?" asked Dermot, smiling archly through one of his little gray eyes, the other, from the long habit of shutting it in shooting, having at last got to be so firmly closed up in a radiating network of fine wrinkles as to have been for the last ten years of his life invisible.
"Pshaw, Cormac!" she cried, stooping till her snowy plumes shaded her burning cheek; "I did not ask Lord Robert, but you."