"Yes," he replied, "yes. But let us not stand here upon the path exposed to the gaze of all the crowd. Come, let us enter this arbour. We shall be unobserved there."
She followed him into the one by which they were standing, and--for she felt her limbs were trembling beneath her--sank on to a rustic bench. And he, standing above her, went on:
"The letter that you sent to me asked that I should pity and forgive you. Kate, we meet again, perhaps for the last time on earth; let me say at once, there is nothing for me to forgive. If fault there was, then it was mine. Let mine, too, be the blame. I should have told you that Elphinston of Glenbervy was about to marry Mademoiselle Baufremont. Yet, he had sworn me to silence, had bidden me, upon our distant kinsmanship, to hold my peace, had sought my assistance to enable him to wed the woman whom he loved. How could I disclose his secret even to you? How could I foresee that a scheming devil would turn so small a thing to so great an account?"
"But," she said, gazing up at him and noticing--for both had instinctively unmasked at the same time--how worn his face was, how, alas! in his brown hair there ran grey threads though he was still so young; "but why, to all those letters I sent, was no answer vouchsafed? I thought from one or from the other some reply must surely come. Have you forgotten how, for many years now, we four--Douglas and Archibald, you and I--had all been as brothers and sister--until--until," she broke off, and then continued: "how we had vowed that between us all there should be a link and bond of friendship that should be incessable?"
"I have forgotten nothing," he replied, "nothing. No word that was ever spoken between us, no vow, nor promise ever made."
Again the soft blue eyes were turned to him, imploringly it seemed; begging by their glance that he should spare her. And, ceasing to speak of his remembrance of the past, he continued: "Circumstances, strange though they were, prevented any one of us from receiving your letters--or from answering them in time. I was lying ill of Roman fever at the English College; Archibald Sholto was in Tuscany in the train of Charles Edward, Cardinal Aquaviva having provided their passports; Douglas was with De Roquefeuille, and received your letter only on his return to Paris, where it had been sent back to him. Kate, in that stirring time, when the prince was passing from Rome to Picardy, was it strange no answer should come?"
"No, no," she replied. "No," and as she spoke she clasped both of her hands in her lap, and bent her head to hide her tears. Then she muttered, yet not so low but that he could hear her: "Had I but waited! but trusted!"
"It would have been best," he said very gently. And as he spoke, as though in mockery of their sad hearts, many of the maskers went by laughing and jesting, and the quadrille being finished the band was playing the merry old tune of "The Bird that danced the Rigadoon."
"You hear the air?" she said, looking up suddenly again. "You hear? Oh! my heart will break."
"Yes," he answered, "I hear."