"Henry Morton," replied Edith, uttering these two words as if they were her last, and very nearly fainting when she had done so.
"Miss Bellenden," said Lord Evandale, "you treat me like a fool or a child. If you repent your engagement to me," he continued, indignantly, "I am not a man to enforce it against your inclination; but deal with me as a man, and forbear this trifling."
He was about to go on, when he perceived, from her quivering eye and pallid cheek, that nothing less than imposture was intended, and that by whatever means her imagination had been so impressed, it was really disturbed by unaffected awe and terror. He changed his tone, and exerted all his eloquence in endeavouring to soothe and extract from her the secret cause of such terror.
"I saw him!" she repeated,—"I saw Henry Morton stand at that window, and look into the apartment at the moment I was on the point of abjuring him for ever. His face was darker, thinner, and paler than it was wont to be; his dress was a horseman's cloak, and hat looped down over his face; his expression was like that he wore on that dreadful morning when he was examined by Claverhouse at Tillietudlem. Ask your sister, ask Lady Emily, if she did not see him as well as I. I know what has called him up,—he came to upbraid me, that, while my heart was with him in the deep and dead sea, I was about to give my hand to another. My lord, it is ended between you and me; be the consequences what they will, she cannot marry whose union disturbs the repose of the dead."
"Good Heaven!" said Evandale, as he paced the room, half mad himself with surprise and vexation, "her fine understanding must be totally overthrown, and that by the effort which she has made to comply with my ill-timed, though well-meant, request. Without rest and attention her health is ruined for ever."
At this moment the door opened, and Halliday, who had been Lord Evandale's principal personal attendant since they both left the Guards on the Revolution, stumbled into the room with a countenance as pale and ghastly as terror could paint it.
"What is the matter next, Halliday?" cried his master, starting up. "Any discovery of the—"
He had just recollection sufficient to stop short in the midst of the dangerous sentence.
"No, sir," said Halliday, "it is not that, nor anything like that; but I have seen a ghost!"
"A ghost, you eternal idiot!" said Lord Evandale, forced altogether out of his patience. "Has all mankind sworn to go mad in order to drive me so? What ghost, you simpleton?"