Such were the words with which at length he strove to cut short their parting interview.  “You will not grant my request, then?” said the Countess.  “Ah, false knight! did ever lady, with bare foot in slipper, seek boon of a brave knight, yet return with denial?”

“Anything, Amy, anything thou canst ask I will grant,” answered the Earl—­“always excepting,” he said, “that which might ruin us both.”

“Nay,” said the Countess, “I urge not my wish to be acknowledged in the character which would make me the envy of England—­as the wife, that is, of my brave and noble lord, the first as the most fondly beloved of English nobles.  Let me but share the secret with my dear father!  Let me but end his misery on my unworthy account—­they say he is ill, the good old kind-hearted man!”

“They say?” asked the Earl hastily; “who says?  Did not Varney convey to Sir Hugh all we dare at present tell him concerning your happiness and welfare? and has he not told you that the good old knight was following, with good heart and health, his favourite and wonted exercise.  Who has dared put other thoughts into your head?”

“Oh, no one, my lord, no one,” said the Countess, something alarmed at the tone, in which the question was put; “but yet, my lord, I would fain be assured by mine own eyesight that my father is well.”

“Be contented, Amy; thou canst not now have communication with thy father or his house.  Were it not a deep course of policy to commit no secret unnecessarily to the custody of more than must needs be, it were sufficient reason for secrecy that yonder Cornish man, yonder Trevanion, or Tressilian, or whatever his name is, haunts the old knight’s house, and must necessarily know whatever is communicated there.”

“My lord,” answered the Countess, “I do not think it so.  My father has been long noted a worthy and honourable man; and for Tressilian, if we can pardon ourselves the ill we have wrought him, I will wager the coronet I am to share with you one day that he is incapable of returning injury for injury.”

“I will not trust him, however, Amy,” said her husband—­“by my honour, I will not trust him, I would rather the foul fiend intermingle in our secret than this Tressilian!”

“And why, my lord?” said the Countess, though she shuddered slightly at the tone of determination in which he spoke; “let me but know why you think thus hardly of Tressilian?”

“Madam,” replied the Earl, “my will ought to be a sufficient reason.  If you desire more, consider how this Tressilian is leagued, and with whom.  He stands high in the opinion of this Radcliffe, this Sussex, against whom I am barely able to maintain my ground in the opinion of our suspicious mistress; and if he had me at such advantage, Amy, as to become acquainted with the tale of our marriage, before Elizabeth were fitly prepared, I were an outcast from her grace for ever—­a bankrupt at once in favour and in fortune, perhaps, for she hath in her a touch of her father Henry—­a victim, and it may be a bloody one, to her offended and jealous resentment.”