"Then leave me not—but take me with thee. I will go happily in the meanest disguise thou mayest assign me—O, I will never be discovered!"
"It may not be, Anna; it is impossible. By St. Paul! I tell thee it is impossible at present."
"In the confidence of thy love I have been dreaming a pleasant dream, and now perhaps am waking from it. Wilt thou love me in thine absence as thou dost now?"
"After my solemn espousal of thee before that holy hermit—canst thou doubt it?" rejoined the Earl, in a voice that faltered with very shame, though to Anna it seemed that grief had rendered it tremulous in tone. The supposed emotion inspired her with sudden confidence in him, and she said—
"Go—and never again will I suspect thy love; but oh! when wilt thou return to me?"
"By Yule-tide, dear Anna, if I am in life;" and, kissing her once again, he hurried from her presence like one who had been guilty of a crime, and—returned no more!
"Oh! how base, how ignoble is this duplicity!" he exclaimed on rejoining Hob Ormiston, who with folded arms had been leaning on the parapet, whistling the "Hunts of Cheviot" to wile away the time. "She weeps so bitterly at my departure, and speaks so trustingly of my return, that my heart is wrung with the misery my damnable deceit and criminal ambition will bring upon her."
"Whew! yet she cared not to deceive one who loved her earlier, longer, and better than thee."
"True," replied the Earl; he became silent for a moment, and while the idea of her ever having loved another caused a pang of mortification in his breast, it was mingled with a coldness from which he drew a consolation for the part he was about to act.
"By cock and pie!" continued Hob, pursuing the advantage his sophistry had gained; "ten thousand women should never stand in my path. I never pursued love so fast as to lose a stirrup by the way; and what the foul fiend matters it whether thou weddest Jane Gordon or not? Thou canst still come and see thy Norwegian sometimes, and I warrant ye Sir Gilbert will prevent her from feeling thine absence much. He is a courtier of jolly King James the Fifth; and he, as thou knowest, kept a dame at every hunting lodge to manage the household. Ha! nay, nay, do not chafe; 'tis but marrying the Lady Jane, and handfasting the Lady Anna; and methinks I need not cite examples among our nobility and knighthood."