"Make amends for the worthless heart thou hast lost."
"Never, Anna!" responded the young man in a troubled voice, while he regarded her with a gaze of love as deep as in the days of yore. "That can never be—Konrad's die is cast;" and, kissing her hands, he sprang through the archway, and, with his mind in a tumult of confusion, hurried after his guide.
A sense of sadness, desolation, and doubt, were ever uppermost in his thoughts, and absorbed all his faculties.
There were none stirring in the city at that early hour; the streets were silent and deserted; and grimly in the grey morning the grated windows of its lofty mansions, tall, and strong, and spectral, with their turnpike towers, crow-stepped gables and Flemish roofs, frowned over the narrow way.
"What time of the morning is it, thinkest thou, for I never could afford me a pocket-dial?" said the peasant, as they descended St. Mary's Wynd.
"About two hours of matin-prime yet."
"Matin-prime hath not rung for these ten years and more from the steeples of Edinburgh," replied the other, with a dark look; "but please God a day shall come, when all the services of our blessed church, the sexte and *none, the vesper and nocturnal, shall toll from every steeple in broad Scotland."
"Shall we meet John of Park in the city?"
"Marry, come up! thinkest thou he values his poor head so lightly that he trusts it there? Though of a sooth to say, 'tis worth more than I thought it; for there, on yonder gate, we will find that the lords of the land offer a hundred unicorns of gold for it. I never could read a line myself; but I heard a certain notary's servitor, a dainty youth in black buckram and a white ruff, read it to the gaping rabble yesternight. A hundred golden unicorns! ha! ha! John of Park, my poor knave! look well to thy harnpan, lest some day thou findest it grinning on yonder spikes!"
With a boisterous laugh, his guide directed Konrad's attention to a huge placard posted on the Porte of St. Mary. This barrier, which extended from east to west across the Pleasance, and gave access to the Wynd and Canongate, was removed in the seventeenth century.