“Go where, my lady?” Alice asked in surprise.
“To the meadow behind the limes,” replied her mistress calmly; “there I shall go to-morrow, at sunrise, and stop this folly. It began in my rooms, Alice, over a ballad, and I have no mind that it shall end in bloodshed.”
“Indeed, madam, I think you are in the right,” said Alice simply, “but what can we do? They will never listen to a woman!”
Lady Clancarty shut her lips firmly, and held her little bare foot out to the fire, warming it.
“I fear you cannot stop them,” Alice went on; “Lord Savile was very fierce, but the other gentleman—oh, madam, I feared him more! he was so cool; and those eyes of his—they are like steel.”
“So they are,” said Betty absently, “and hath he not a handsome face?” and she looked pensively into the fire. “To-morrow we shall go, Alice, to-morrow at sunrise, and I shall stop this duel—I will stop it, if I have to go to the king!”
But the little handmaid did not reply; she was watching her mistress with an anxious face. She did not know the meaning of this new Lady Betty, and some hint of impending trouble weighed upon her. She was country bred, too, and timid, and the thought of the gray dawn with the shadowy trees looming through the mist and only the flash of steel to illumine the scene, made her tremble. But Betty, usually so observant and sympathetic and light hearted, did not heed her; she was suddenly self-absorbed, pensive, quietly determined. She went to the window and peeped out into the night.
“How many hours until sunrise, Alice?” she asked.
“Six, my lady,” the girl replied with a sigh, “and I wish it might be sixteen!”
Betty laughed, a strange little embarrassed laugh, coming back and sinking on her knees before the hearth, the firelight playing on her lovely face, and the shadowy masses of her hair, and the gleaming white of her draperies.