"Mrs. Gaunt is careful, but I can trust the lips that now reprove me. They were made for better things than betraying a friend. I would willingly have some good advice from them, seeing that they speak wise words so readily." And so saying he sat down on the settle, and looked at me smiling.
I was offended, and with reason, at the freedom of his speech; yet, his manner, was so much beyond anything I had been accustomed to for ease and pleasantness, that I soon forgave him, and when he encouraged me, began to prattle about my affairs, being only, with all my conceit, the silly lassie my mistress had called me.
I talked of my home and my own kindred, and the friends I had had—which things had now all the charm of remoteness for me—and he listened with interest, catching up the names of places, and even of persons, as if they were not altogether strange to him, and asking me further of them.
"What could make you leave so happy a home for such a dungeon as this?" he asked, looking round.
Then I hung my head, and reddened foolishly, but he gave a loud laugh and said, "I can well understand. There was some country lout that your father would have wedded you to. That is the way with the prettiest maidens."
"Tom Windham was no country lout," I answered proudly; upon which he leaned forward and asked, "What name was that you said? Windham? and from Westover? Is he a tall fellow with straw-coloured hair and a cut over his left eye?"
"He got it in a good cause," I answered swiftly; "have you seen him?"
"Yes, lately. It is the same. Lucky fellow! I would I were in his place now." And he fell straightway into a moody taking, looking down as if he had forgotten me.
"Sir, do you say so?" I stammered foolishly, "when—when——"
"When you have run away from him? Not for that, little maid;" and he broke again into a laugh that had mischief in it. "But because when we last met he was in luck and I out of it, yet we guessed it not at the time."