“If you will call me your dearest Catherine, when I have given you so many names to choose upon,” replied the damsel, “I would ask you how, supposing me for two or three hours of my life escaped from yonder tower, you have the cruelty to ask me to be serious during the only merry moments I have seen perhaps for months?”
“Ay, but, fair Catherine, there are moments of deep and true feeling, which are worth ten thousand years of the liveliest mirth; and such was that of yesterday, when you so nearly—”
“So nearly what?” demanded the damsel, hastily.
“When you approached your lips so near to the sign you had traced on my forehead.”
“Mother of Heaven!” exclaimed she, in a yet fiercer tone, and with a more masculine manner than she had yet exhibited,-“Catherine Seyton approach her lips to a man's brow, and thou that man!—vassal, thou liest!”
The page stood astonished; but, conceiving he had alarmed the damsel's delicacy by alluding to the enthusiasm of a moment, and the manner in which she had expressed it, he endeavoured to falter forth an apology. His excuses, though he was unable to give them any regular shape, were accepted by his companion, who had indeed suppressed her indignation after its first explosion—“Speak no more on't,” she said. “And now let us part; our conversation may attract more notice than is convenient for either of us.”
“Nay, but allow me at least to follow you to some sequestered place.”
“You dare not,” replied the maiden.
“How,” said the youth, “dare not? where is it you dare go, where I dare not follow?”
“You fear a Will o' the Wisp,” said the damsel; “how would you face a fiery dragon, with an enchantress mounted on its back?”