"Ay; but if he is come to chase us all out of the castle," said the boy,
"and has twenty men at his back in disguise; and is come to say, with
a hollow voice, 'I bide my time'; and is to kill you on the hearth as
Malise did the other man, and whose blood is still to be seen!"
"Hush! nonsense!" said the Lord Keeper, not himself much pleased to hear
these disagreeable coincidences forced on his notice. "Master, here comes
Lockhard to say supper is served."
And, at the same instant, Lucy entered at another door, having changed
her dress since her return. The exquisite feminine beauty of her
countenance, now shaded only by a profusion of sunny tresses; the
sylph-like form, disencumbered of her heavy riding-skirt and mantled in
azure silk; the grace of her manner and of her smile, cleared, with
a celerity which surprised the Master himself, all the gloomy and
unfavourable thoughts which had for some time overclouded his fancy.
In those features, so simply sweet, he could trace no alliance with
the pinched visage of the peak-bearded, black-capped Puritan, or his
starched, withered spouse, with the craft expressed in the Lord Keeper's
countenance, or the haughtiness which predominated in that of his lady;
and, while he gazed on Lucy Ashton, she seemed to be an angel descended
on earth, unallied to the coarses mortals among whom she deigned to
dwell for a season.
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