“That will only give him pain,” replied Roper.
“Perhaps,” said the young girl. “Indeed, it is very probable!” And a bitter smile played around her lips.
“If you love him,” replied Roper, “you should spare him this grief.”
“I love him, Roper; you have said well! I love him! What would you wish? This is my father!”
Pierre Gilles, who had advanced, seeking some means of entering, paused to look at the young girl, and was struck by the resemblance he found between her features and those of her father, his friend, who was still young when he knew him at Antwerp.
“Can this be Margaret?” murmured the stranger.
“Who has pronounced my name?” asked the young girl, turning haughtily around.
Pierre Gilles stood in perfect amazement. “How much she resembles him! Pardon me, damsel,” he said; “I have been trying to get into this place to see my friend, Sir Thomas More.”
“Your friend!” replied Margaret, advancing immediately toward him. Then a feeling of suspicion arrested her. She stepped back and fixed her eyes on the stranger, whose Flemish costume attracted her attention. “And who,” she said, “can you be? Oh! no; he is not here. Sir Thomas More has no friends. You are mistaken, sir,” she continued; “it is some one else you seek. My father—no, my father has no longer any friends; has any one when he is in irons, when the scaffold is erected, the axe sharpened, and the executioner getting ready to do his work?”
“What do you say?” cried the stranger, turning pale. “Is he, then, already condemned?”