“I’d be a belle there,” she observed.  “I’d have a train o’ beaux and macaronis at my heels, I warrant you!  The foppier, the more it would please me.  Think, cousin—­ranks of them all a-simper, ogling me through a hundred quizzing-glasses!  Heigho!  There’s doubtless some deviltry in me, as Sir Lupus says.”

She yawned again, looked up at the stars, then fell to twisting her fan with idle fingers.

“I suppose,” she said, more to herself than to me, “that Sir John is now close to the table’s edge, and Colonel Claus is under it....  Hark to their song, all off the key!  But who cares?... so that they quarrel not....  Like those twin brawlers of Glencoe, ... brooding on feuds nigh a hundred years old....  I have no patience with a brooder, one who treasures wrongs, ... like Walter Butler.”  She looked up at me.

“I warned you,” she said.

“It is not easy to avoid insulting him,” I replied.

“I warned you of that, too.  Now you’ve a quarrel, and a reckoning in prospect.”

“The reckoning is far off,” I retorted, ill-humoredly.

“Far off—­yes.  Further away than you know.  You will never cross swords with Walter Butler.”

“And why not?”

“He means to use the Iroquois.”

I was silent.

“For the honor of your women, you cannot fight such a man,” she added, quietly.

“I wish I had the right to protect your honor,” I said, so suddenly and so bitterly that I surprised myself.

“Have you not?” she asked, gravely.  “I am your kinswoman.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” I muttered, and fell to plucking at the lace on my wristbands.

The dawn’s chill was in the air, the dawn’s silence, too, and I saw the calm morning star on the horizon, watching the dark world—­the dark, sad world, lying so still, so patient, under the ancient sky.

That melancholy—­which is an omen, too—­left me benumbed, adrift in a sort of pained contentment which alternately soothed and troubled, so that at moments I almost drowsed, and at moments I heard my heart stirring, as though in dull expectancy of beatitudes undreamed of.

Dorothy, too, sat listless, pensive, and in her eyes a sombre shadow, such as falls on children’s eyes at moments, leaving their elders silent.

Once in the false dawn a cock crowed, and the shrill, far cry left the raw air emptier and the silence more profound.  I looked wistfully at the maid beside me, chary of intrusion into the intimacy of her silence.  Presently her vague eyes met mine, and, as though I had spoken, she said:  “What is it?”

“Only this:  I am sorry you are pledged.”

“Why, cousin?”

“It is unfair.”

“To whom?”

“To you.  Bid him undo it and release you.”

“What matters it?” she said, dully.

“To wed, one should love,” I muttered.

“I cannot,” she answered, without moving.  “I would I could.  This night has witched me to wish for love—­to desire it; and I sit here a-thinking, a-thinking....  If love ever came to me I should think it would come now—­ere the dawn; here, where all is so dark and quiet and close to God....  Cousin, this night, for the first moment in all my life, I have desired love.”