“Even as I am at this moment: here, in this garden. ’Tis evidently a deserted place; the shrubbery and walls conceal us, and escape is easy to the glen yonder if we should hear anybody approach. No one, finding you here alone, would suspect you had had a visitor.”
“I must not risk that discovery,—for your sake, I must not. I shall be missed in the house, I’m afraid,—my uncle and his friends have returned.”
“Nay, don’t go yet. Pray, not yet! I have said nothing yet, accomplished nothing.”
“What would you say, then? Speak quickly.”
“A thousand things. I can’t unload my heart of a sudden at the cry, ‘Stand and deliver!’—you send my thoughts into confusion. Do not go yet!—’tis not so much saying what I would, as being with you.”
“But they will be inquiring for me—my maid will be seeking. My uncle—”
“Is your uncle so heedful of you that he must always know where you are?”
“Far from it. I am nothing to him and his friends. But if the whim should seize him—if by any chance they should find me talking with a stranger—Oh, really, sir, I must go.”
“Again you call me stranger!”
“Why, in their eyes you would be a stranger.”