“What promise?”
“Cruel—cruel! You are trifling with my misery; but you cannot make it more. Ah! the white gauntlet! When it was brought back—with your message that accompanied it—my dream of happiness came to an end. My heart was broken!”
“Brought back—the white gauntlet—message!”
“Marion!” cried Sir Marmaduke, who had by this time disposed of the pretty quarrel between Scarthe and his own following; “Indoors, my daughter! and see that your father’s house does not forfeit its character for hospitality. There’s dust upon the king’s highway; which somehow or other has got into the throats of our worthy friends from Uxbridge, Denham, and Iver. Surely there’s an antidote in the cellars of Bulstrode? Go find it, my girl!”
Promptly did Marion obey the commands of her father; the more promptly, from having been admonished, by the surprise exhibited in Holtspur’s countenance, that the return of her token would admit of a different interpretation, from that she had hitherto put upon it.
Time permitting, it would be a pleasant task to depict the many joyous scenes that took place in the precincts of Bulstrode Park, subsequent to the departure of Scarthe and his cuirassiers.
Lora, no longer subject to the tiresome importunities of Stubbs, found little else to do than listen to Walter’s pretty love prattlings—excepting to respond to them.
Near at hand were two hearts equally en rapport with one another—equally brimful of beatitude—trembling under a passion still more intense—the one paramount passion of a life, destined to endure to its ending.
It was no young love’s dream,—no fickle fondness—that filled the bosoms of Henry Holtspur and Marion Wade; but a love that burned with a bold, blazing flame—like a torch that no time could extinguish—such a love as may exist between the eagle and his majestic mate.