"Fatality!" replied the Earl, with a cold and haughty smile. "Fatality! O woman! knowest thou not that every action of my life has been impelled by an overruling principle, which I could neither see, nor avert, nor avoid? and I know not on what other shoals and rocks of danger and intrigue, this current of my inevitable fete may hurry me. But I feel within me a solemn presentiment that this right hand shall yet do deeds at which the boldest hearts—and my own, too—shall be startled and dismayed."
"Away from me further; for now I see thou art tainted with the cursed heresies of Calvin. Fatality! This is not the Catholic doctrine thy pious mother, Agnes of Sinclair, instilled into thy mind. Now I no longer need to marvel at thy duplicity. Thou who art false to thy God, may well be false to me; or art thou growing mad, too? Away to Anna, and leave me!"
"Anna?"
"Yes, Anna—'tis the name thou hast often muttered in thy sleep, when, with a heart full of love, I lay waking and watching by thy side, and these evil dreams were my meed. Hence to thy Norwegian!"
"By St. Paul! this fellow, Konrad, hath been with thee! Ah, villain and traitor! beware how thou comest again within the reach of Bothwell's dagger. Ho, Hob of Ormiston!—John of Bolton!—Calder!—Paris!—ho there! What a blockhead, what a jack-a-lent I have been!"
The page appeared, and too frightened to remember his fee now, trembled in every limb at the domestic storm he had been partly the means of raising.
"Has any one had access to the Countess?" asked the Earl, with a terrible frown.
"None—none, my lord, that I know aught of."
"French Paris, thou art a subtle little villain, and hadst thou not been gifted to me, like a marmozet, by the Queen, I would have cracked thy head, as thy likeness would a nut, to obtain the truth! Have the lairds of Ormiston or Bolton returned yet?"
"This moment only, my lord. They are in the hall, and in their armour yet."