"Gentle Anna," said he, in his softest and most dulcet French, "for my unseasonable interruption I crave pardon, and beg that you will continue, for every chord of my heart is stirred when you sing."
"There is but one verse more," replied Anna, as she bent her head with a graceful inclination, and shaking back her long fair tresses, continued—
IV
"Then haste my fear Luah,
O haste to the grove!
To pass the sweet season
Of summer in love.
In youth let our bosoms
With ecstasy glow;
For the winter of life
Ne'er a transport can know."
"Sadly true it is, fair Anna," said the amorous Earl, as he leaned against the gothic parapet, and very nonchalantly played with his fingers among her flowing ringlets; "youth is indeed the only season for love and joy—for due susceptibility of the blooming and the beautiful."
"And for futile wishes and dreamy fancies," replied the young lady with a sad smile.
"Dost thou moralize?" laughed the Earl; "why, gentle one, I who am ten years thy senior have never once dreamt of morality yet—moralizing I would say—ha! ha! that will suit when my years number sixty or so, if some unlucky lance or sword-thrust does not, ere that time, spoil me for being a doting old monk; for, as the white-haired Earl Douglas said, when he in old age assumed the cowl, 'One who may no better be, must be a monk.' (By the mass I would make a rare friar!) To me there is something very droll in hearing a pretty woman moralize. And so thou considerest youth the season for dreams and fancies?"
"O yes! for now I am ever full of them."
"'Tis well," replied Bothwell, glancing at the rugged castle, and its still more rugged scenery; "for there are times when the realities of life are not very pleasant. But hath not old age its fancies too, and its dreams?"
"True, my Lord, but dreams of the past."
"Nay, of the present. Faith! I remember me when I was but a boy at Paris, old Anne, Madame la Duchesse d'Estampes, who might have been my grandmother, fell in love with my slender limbs and beardless chin, and wellnigh brought me to death's door with her villanous love philtres. From those days upward, my own mind has been full of its fancies, fair Anna, and I have had my daydreams of power and ambition, of love and grandeur, and wakened but to find them dreams indeed!"