"Does he not scent the dying like a raven? When once his eye is upon them they shall not escape. There be some that have seen their last o' this green earth, and the sky, and yonder bright hills. I trust the destroying angel will pass by this house!"
"By'r lady," replied the other hastily, "the varlet, when I asked whose lodging it should be, answered, mine! holding forth his long skinny paw that I might pay him for the job."
The maiden listened with a look of terror. She grew pale and almost ghastly; wiping her brow with the corner of her apron, as though in great agitation and perplexity.
There was usually a warm and healthy blush upon her cheek, but it waned suddenly into the dim hue of apprehension, as she replied in a low whisper—
"Ye must not go hence; and yet"——She hesitated, and appeared as though deeply revolving some secret source of both anxiety and alarm.
The cavalier was silent too, but the result of his deliberations was of a nature precisely opposite to that of his fair opponent.
"Our beasts being ready, Chisenhall," said he to his companion, "we will depart while the day holds on favourable. We may have worse weather, and still worse quarters, should we tarry here till noontide, as we purposed. But"—and here he looked earnestly at the maiden—"we shall come again, I trust, when they that seek our lives be laid low."
She put one hand on his arm, speaking not aloud, but with great earnestness—
"Go not; and your lives peradventure shall be given you for a prey. There is a godly man hereabout, unto whom I will have recourse; and he shall guide you in this perplexity."
"We be men having little time to spare, and less inclination—higlers too, into the bargain," replied he, with a dubious glance toward his friend Chisenhall, who was just despatching the last visible relics of a repast in which he had taken a more than equal share of the duty; "we are not careful to tarry, or to resort unto such ghostly counsel. We would rather listen to the lips of those whose least word we covet more than the preaching of either priest or Puritan; but the time is now come when we must eschew even such blessed and holy"——