“Sir,” said Miss Ashton, “you are generous.”

“As for that, madam,” answered Bucklaw, “I only pretend to be a plain, good-humoured young fellow, as I said before, who will willingly make you happy if you will permit him, and show him how to do so.”  Having said this, he saluted her with more emotion than was consistent with his usual train of feeling, and took his leave; Lady Ashton, as she accompanied him out of the apartment, assuring him that her daughter did full justice to the sincerity of his attachment, and requesting him to see Sir William before his departure, “since,” as she said, with a keen glance reverting towards Lucy, “against St. Jude’s day, we must all be ready to sign and seal.”

“To sign and seal!” echoed Lucy, in a muttering tone, as the door of the apartment closed—­“to sign and seal—­to do and die!” and, clasping her extenuated hands together, she sunk back on the easy-chair she occupied, in a state resembling stupor.

From this she was shortly after awakened by the boisterous entry of her brother Henry, who clamorously reminded her of a promise to give him two yards of carnation ribbon to make knots to his new garters.  With the most patient composure Lucy arose, and opening a little ivory cabinet, sought out the ribbon the lad waned, measured it accurately, cut it off into proper lengths, and knotted it into the fashion his boyish whim required.

“Dinna shut the cabinet yet,” said Henry, “for I must have some of your silver wire to fasten the bells to my hawk’s jesses,—­and yet the new falcon’s not worth them neither; for do you know, after all the plague we had to get her from an eyrie, all the way at Posso, in Mannor Water, she’s going to prove, after all, nothing better than a rifler:  she just wets her singles in the blood of the partridge, and then breaks away, and lets her fly; and what good can the poor bird do after that, you know, except pine and die in the first heather-cow or whin-bush she can crawl into?”

“Right, Henry—­right—­very right,” said Luch, mournfully, holding the boy fast by the hand, after she had given him the wire he wanted; “but there are more riflers in the world than your falcon, and more wounded birds that seek but to die in quiet, that can find neither brake nor whin-bush to hide their head in.”

“Ah! that’s some speech out of your romances,” said the boy; “and Sholto says they have turned your head.  But I hear Norman whistling to the hawk; I must go fasten on the jesses.”

And he scampered away with the thoughtless gaiety of boyhood, leaving his sister to the bitterness of her own reflections.

“It is decreed,” she said, “that every living creature, even those who owe me most kindness, are to shun me, and leave me to those by whom I am beset.  It is just it should be thus.  Alone and uncounselled, I involved myself in these perils; alone and uncounselled, I must extricate myself or die.”