“Oh, how could I love anybody else? O Cuthbert, how happy thou hast made me! Art sure thou speakest sooth?”
“Sooth! ay, that I do. Thou art the sweetest maid the sun e’er looked on. Thou wert the fairest of all that gay company at my Lord Andover’s, and many beside myself said as much. Cherry, thou shalt one day be my own true wife; and if kind fortune do but favour me, thou shalt have gold and jewels and fine robes enow, and shalt hold up thy head with the best of them: see if it be not so!”
A boy and girl wooing certainly, but none the less hearty for that. The love had been growing silently for many weeks, the young folks scarcely knowing what they were learning to be to each other. And now these sudden burning words had revealed all, and Cherry felt more than ever that she trod on air and moved in a dream; only this time there was the pleasant sense that the dream would not vanish away in smoke, but would become more and more a living reality.
But there was something Cuthbert had said which yet required explanation, and presently she looked up and asked:
“What didst thou mean when thou spokest of a lost treasure? What is it, and who has lost it?”
And then Cuthbert forthwith plunged into the story of the lost treasure of Trevlyn, as he had heard it from his cousin Kate; and Cherry listened with parted lips, thinking that it was almost like living in some play to be hearing this strange tale.
When she heard of the gipsies and their vengeful words, she stopped suddenly short and gazed intently at Cuthbert.
“This is the second time thou hast spoken of gipsies,” she said, in a whisper. “Thou hast yet to tell me the tale of how thou didst spend a night in the gipsies’ cave. Cuthbert, were those gipsies thou didst light upon that night of thy flight the same as have stolen the treasure from Trevlyn?”
“Cherry, I trow that they are,” he answered, in a very low voice, bending his head closer over her as he spoke. “Listen, and I will tell thee all. There was an old fierce woman, with hair as white as driven snow, among them, who, when she heard the name of Trevlyn, launched at me a glance of hatred that I never can forget; and I knew well by her looks and her words that, had she had her will, I should have suffered the same fate that her mother had done from the hands of my grandfather. I knew not then that it was her mother who had been burnt by him as a witch; but I saw the evil purposed me, and knew she was my foe. But a stately woman—the old gipsy’s daughter, as I later learned—interposed on my behalf, and her all obeyed as queen, even her mother bowing down before her. She protected me, and bid me sit at table with them, saw me served with the best, and at night showed me herself to a ruinous bed chamber where, however, a weary man might comfortably lodge. There she left me, but bid me not to undress; and presently after I had slept,