“‘MY GOD, JOSCELYN, YOU WILL NOT GIVE ME UP LIKE THAT!’”
CHAPTER XXII.
“SEARCH MY LADY’S WARDROBE.”
“Sweetheart? not she whose voice was music-sweet,
Whose face loaned language to melodious prayer;
Sweetheart I called her.—When did she repeat
Sweet to one hope or heart to one despair?”
—Cawein.
To the man crouching behind the door which Joscelyn had left open, the minute it took her to traverse the hall and gain the head of the stairs at the far end, seemed a lifetime. Even in his dire peril the thought of a bygone day came back to him—“loyal, though a Loyalist,” he had said of her, and had believed it. What a sweetheart to have coddled in one’s thoughts and dreamed of, waking and sleeping,—this girl who would in cold blood hand him over to death because of a fancied duty! Escape by the way he came was impossible; he could only wait here and sell his life at the highest price. Ay, there should be left in this room a memory that would exile her from it forever; the blood that had beat for her and which she had betrayed, should redden her floor and stain the dainty things she loved.