"I act under the orders of another——"
"Another!—to whom do you yield this obedience? To me you seem inferior to none on earth."
"To none, I trust, in your estimation," said she, coquettishly.
"But to esteem, to love you as I do—to have intrusted you with my name, and yet to know not yours, is unkind, unfair, and subjecting me to torture and anxiety."
"I cannot give you my name—oh, pardon me, for in this matter, be assured, I am not my own mistress," said she, in a trembling voice.
"This is most strange, and like a chapter of Amadis, or some old romance. Then how shall I name you?"
"'Urganda the unknown,'[*] or aught you please," she replied, smiling to conceal her confusion as she withdrew her hand; and, taking from one of her fair and slender fingers a ring, she dropped it on the pillow of Florence, adding, "take this trinket—it has a secret by which one day you may know me. Take it, Florence Fawside, and wear it in memory of one who will never cease to regard you with most mournful interest, but who can never even be your—friend!"
[*] A famous enchantress in Amadis de Gaul.
"In memory—as if I could forget you while life and breath remained?" exclaimed Florence, bending over the jewel (an opal) to kiss it.
When he looked up the fair donor was gone. A tremulous motion of the arras in the twilight—eve had now closed in—indicated where she had vanished, before he could arrest her by word or deed, and implore an explanation of the strange and enigmatical words which had accompanied a gift so priceless to a lover.