‘Ah, you have lost your lover, Milly,’ said Lady Caroline.
The young woman could not repress her tears. ‘My lady, he was not quite my lover,’ she said. ‘But I was his—and now he is dead I don’t care to live any more!’
‘Can you keep a secret about him?’ asks the lady; ‘one in which his honour is involved—which is known to me alone, but should be known to you?’
The girl readily promised, and, indeed, could be safely trusted on such a subject, so deep was her affection for the youth she mourned.
‘Then meet me at his grave to-night, half-an-hour after sunset, and I will tell it to you,’ says the other.
In the dusk of that spring evening the two shadowy figures of the young women converged upon the assistant-steward’s newly-turfed mound; and at that solemn place and hour, the one of birth and beauty unfolded her tale: how she had loved him and married him secretly; how he had died in her chamber; and how, to keep her secret, she had dragged him to his own door.
‘Married him, my lady!’ said the rustic maiden, starting back.
‘I have said so,’ replied Lady Caroline. ‘But it was a mad thing, and a mistaken course. He ought to have married you. You, Milly, were peculiarly his. But you lost him.’
‘Yes,’ said the poor girl; ‘and for that they laughed at me. “Ha—ha, you mid love him, Milly,” they said; “but he will not love you!”’
‘Victory over such unkind jeerers would be sweet,’ said Lady Caroline. ‘You lost him in life; but you may have him in death as if you had had him in life; and so turn the tables upon them.’