“Madam,” said Varney, overwhelmed in spite of his effrontery, “I entreat you to believe yourself mistaken.”

“As soon will I believe light darkness,” said the enraged Countess.  “Have I drunk of oblivion?  Do I not remember former passages, which, known to Leicester, had given thee the preferment of a gallows, instead of the honour of his intimacy.  I would I were a man but for five minutes!  It were space enough to make a craven like thee confess his villainy.  But go—­begone!  Tell thy master that when I take the foul course to which such scandalous deceits as thou hast recommended on his behalf must necessarily lead me, I will give him a rival something worthy of the name.  He shall not be supplanted by an ignominious lackey, whose best fortune is to catch a gift of his master’s last suit of clothes ere it is threadbare, and who is only fit to seduce a suburb-wench by the bravery of new roses in his master’s old pantoufles.  Go, begone, sir!  I scorn thee so much that I am ashamed to have been angry with thee.”

Varney left the room with a mute expression of rage, and was followed by Foster, whose apprehension, naturally slow, was overpowered by the eager and abundant discharge of indignation which, for the first time, he had heard burst from the lips of a being who had seemed, till that moment, too languid and too gentle to nurse an angry thought or utter an intemperate expression.  Foster, therefore, pursued Varney from place to place, persecuting him with interrogatories, to which the other replied not, until they were in the opposite side of the quadrangle, and in the old library, with which the reader has already been made acquainted.  Here he turned round on his persevering follower, and thus addressed him, in a tone tolerably equal, that brief walk having been sufficient to give one so habituated to command his temper time to rally and recover his presence of mind.

“Tony,” he said, with his usual sneering laugh, “it avails not to deny it.  The Woman and the Devil, who, as thine oracle Holdforth will confirm to thee, cheated man at the beginning, have this day proved more powerful than my discretion.  Yon termagant looked so tempting, and had the art to preserve her countenance so naturally, while I communicated my lord’s message, that, by my faith, I thought I might say some little thing for myself.  She thinks she hath my head under her girdle now, but she is deceived.  Where is Doctor Alasco?”

“In his laboratory,” answered Foster.  “It is the hour he is spoken not withal.  We must wait till noon is past, or spoil his important—­what said I? important!—­I would say interrupt his divine studies.”

“Ay, he studies the devil’s divinity,” said Varney; “but when I want him, one hour must suffice as well as another.  Lead the way to his pandemonium.”

So spoke Varney, and with hasty and perturbed steps followed Foster, who conducted him through private passages, many of which were well-nigh ruinous, to the opposite side of the quadrangle, where, in a subterranean apartment, now occupied by the chemist Alasco, one of the Abbots of Abingdon, who had a turn for the occult sciences, had, much to the scandal of his convent, established a laboratory, in which, like other fools of the period, he spent much precious time, and money besides, in the pursuit of the grand arcanum.