"Madam," said the stout captain of the Biornen, bowing as low as his great paunch and long basket-hilted espadone would permit him, "allow me to introduce to you the terrible pirate who, for the last month, has been the terror of our Fiords, and the scourge of the Sound, and whom we find to be no other than the great Earl of Bothwell, with whose astounding misdeeds all Europe has been ringing."
Anna scarcely heard a word of the captain's address. On first beholding the Earl, she had trembled violently, and then became pale as death. Her eyes filled with fire, and she regarded him with a long, fixed, and serpent-like gaze, that even he had some trouble in meeting.
"Well, madam," said he, with one of his graceful smiles, "when last we stood together in this hall, we foresaw not the day when we would greet each other thus."
"The meeting is as unexpected to me as our last may have been to you, my Lord Earl," replied Anna in French, but with admirable hauteur and firmness. "So, pirate and outlaw, as I now understand thee to be, thou hast lived to see all thy wild visions and schemes of ambition crumble and fade away, and now thou art a captive in the power of her thou didst so deeply wrong, and so cruelly insult."
"True, madam," replied Bothwell, curling his mustache, "and what then?"
"Dost thou not know that thy life and liberty are alike in my power?"
"I am glad of it, being assured that they could not be in safer keeping."
"Oh, man! cold and heartless as thou art," said Anna, who seemed now to have forgotten her own infatuated passion for the Earl, "I cannot but admire this stately calmness under a reverse of fortune so terrible. Were thy fate fully in mine own hands, I would return thee to the land from whence thou hast fled, leaving the flames of civil war to rage behind thee—to the arms of her thou didst love and win, so fatally for herself—or I would again commit thee to the wide ocean, to follow thy wayward fate on other shores; for now there can neither be love nor loyalty, nor falsehood nor truth, between us—but the will of the king sayeth nay!"
"And what sayeth the will of Frederick?" asked Bothwell, with proud surprise.
"That thou and thy followers must be separated."