With one rapid glance of terror Lilian surveyed the whole place, and started from her chair to be confronted by one whose aspect made her instinctively shrink back. The keen and hawk-like eyes of Beatrix Gilruth were fixed upon her with an expression at once menacing, searching, and scornful. There was something in the wild visage of this inexplicable woman that excited curiosity, while her air terrified, and her withered person repelled approach.
"Who are you, woman?" asked Lilian firmly, as, stepping back a pace, she surveyed her from head to foot; "and what are you?"
"What am I?" reiterated the other, with a voice that thrilled, while her grey eyes gleamed with a blue light, and she ground her teeth. "I am what thou shalt be, my pretty minx, ere ye leave these walls, perhaps."
Lilian, terrified by her aspect and her answer, sank into a chair, saying, as she clasped her hands, and looked up imploringly from her bright dishevelled hair—
"Woman, for the love of God, say where am I?"
"In the tower of Clermistonlee."
"So my soul foreboded; but can he have dared thus far?"
"What will he not dare that man can do?"
"O Heaven, protect me!"
"Neither the Heaven that is above us, nor the Hell that is beneath, will protect you, pretty one; but you will be made what many as fair have been,—the toy, the plaything of an hour, to be cast aside when some new fancy has seized the wayward mind of your lord and betrayer. Look at that veiled portrait——"