"And why is it either improper or impossible?" he asked suddenly, confronting her with a cold and imperious aspect.
"Because," replied Lily, who trembled while she resented this lofty bearing; "because my heart is no longer my own, and oh, Halbert! you know that well."
Though this was quite the answer he expected, anguish distorted the brow, and fury glared in the eyes of Gordon; for there was something intensely exasperating in hearing such an avowal from her own beautiful lips. His mouth was compressed, and his dark eyes regarded her fixedly with a gloomy scrutiny.
Footsteps were heard approaching, and the clear clank of Rippon spurs, that jangled as the wearer strode through the echoing glade. A joyful expression spread over the face of fair Lily; but a spasm shot through the heart of Gordon, for he knew that he was no longer wanted there, and that Kenneth Logie approached.
Unable to confront this young man otherwise than as an enemy, and still more unable to endure his meeting with Lily, Gordon bestowed upon her a deep and inexplicable smile; threw his carbine into the hollow of his left arm, and, crossing the Dee, though its waters came up to his waist-belt, sprang up the opposite bank, and disappeared among the thick coppice that covered it.
"Fie, cousin Kenneth!" said Lily playfully, as she tapped him on the cheek with her pretty hand; "is it thus ye keep tryst?"
Kenneth had been late in meeting her, and, as he had not seen Gordon when approaching, he proposed that they should seat themselves by the bank of the stream to converse a little; and, agitated as she had been by her lucent painful interview, fair Lily gladly consented.
On the grassy brae, with the still water flowing at their feet, and the hawthorn spreading its white and fragrant branches above them, they conversed in low tones, with long pauses, for they were wrapped in the purest and dearest of dreaming. Lily soon forgot the terrible, the fixed regards of Halbert Gordon.
They knew not—those happy lovers—that from the opposite bank, and scarcely a pistol-shot distant, two fierce eyes were watching them.
I have said that Kenneth Logie was handsome, strong, and active; the bloom of twenty years was on his cheek, and his fine figure was displayed to advantage by the Scoto-French costume of the Lowlands. His blue velvet bonnet lay beside him, and his high white forehead, around which the dark hair curled in heavy locks, was bare. He was all that a young girl dreams of in her future lover; and his eyes, by turns expressive of pride, tenderness, and impetuosity, were bent fondly on the golden-haired fairy that sat by his side—she, whose ringlets poured like a shower upon his breast, and whose soft violet eyes were raised to his, from, time to time, with appeals of confiding tenderness; for he was the friend of her earliest memory, and all her affections, and all her thoughts and hopes, were entwined with his idea and his name.