The Countess uttered a wild cry, and threw her clasped hands above her head.
"Holy Mother look upon me, that my senses may be preserved! That ring was mine—my betrothal gift to him. He said 'twas lost during his exile; and with that gift (which my good and pious kinsman, the Bishop of Dunblane, blessed on our plighting day) he hath espoused another! But I will be avenged! and by the soul of my murdered father, who with his sword in his hand and the cross on his brow, fell on the field of Corrichie, I will raise through all Strathbolgie and Aboyne a cry for vengeance, that Scotland will long remember!"
"Against whom, lady?" asked Konrad, who had now a dash of the cynic in his manner. "The man thou lovest?"
But there was no reply. Exhausted by the fury of that tempest of passion, which convulsed a frame at all times too excitable and nervous, the Countess had become insensible; and then Konrad, full of the tenderest concern, was approaching, when French Paris, who had been listening intently to the whole interview, and now began to tremble for his own bones, raised the arras, and, plucking him by the sword, said—
"If thou valuest thy life, follow me and begone! Her cries have reached the hall, and already I hear the voice of the Earl."
They rushed down the secret stair to the postern, the arras barely closing over Konrad at one end of the bower chamber, when the astonished Earl raised it at the other.
CHAPTER XXI.
DISAPPOINTMENT.
Once more the gate behind me falls;
Once more before my face
I see the moulder'd abbey walls
That stand within the chase.
Tennyson.
Konrad stood on Bothwell bank, the wooded declivity that sloped abruptly to the margin of the Clyde, in whose deep bosom the stars were now reflected; for all traces of the storm had died away, and the wet foliage of the woodlands was rustling in the soft west wind that blew from the darkened hills of Lanark.