The Lord Keeper took one of the fellows aside, and questioned him more closely what the Master of Ravenswood had said.

“He just said he wadna come back,” said the man, with the caution of a prudent Scotchman, who cared not to be the bearer of an unpleasant errand.

“He said something more, sir,” said the Lord Keeper, “and I insist on knowing what it was.”

“Why, then, my lord,” said the man, looking down, “he said—­But it wad be nae pleasure to your lordship to hear it, for I dare say the Master meant nae ill.”

“That’s none of your concern, sir; I desire to hear the very words.”

“Weel, then,” replied the man, “he said, ’Tell Sir William Ashton that the next time he and I forgather, he will nto be half sae blythe of our meeting as of our parting.’”

“Very well, sir,” said the Lord Keeper, “I believe he alludes to a wager we have on our hawks; it is a matter of no consequence.”

He turned to his daughter, who was by this time so much recovered as to be able to walk home.  But the effect, which the various recollections connected with a scene so terrific made upon a mind which was susceptible in an extreme degree, was more permanent than the injury which her nerves had sustained.  Visions of terror, both in sleep and in waking reveries, recalled to her the form of the furious animal, and the dreadful bellow with which he accompanied his career; and it was always the image of the Master of Ravenswood, with his native nobleness of countenance and form, that seemed to interpose betwixt her and assured death.  It is, perhaps, at all times dangerous for a young person to suffer recollection to dwell repeatedly, and with too much complacency, on the same individual; but in Lucy’s situation it was almost unavoidable.  She had never happened to see a young man of mien and features so romantic and so striking as young Ravenswood; but had she seen an hundred his equals or his superiors in those particulars, no one else would have been linked to her heart by the strong associations of remembered danger and escape, of gratitude, wonder, and curiosity.  I say curiosity, for it is likely that the singularly restrained and unaccommodating manners of the Master of Ravenswood, so much at variance with the natural expression of his features and grace of his deportment, as they excited wonder by the contrast, had their effect in riveting her attention to the recollections.  She knew little of Ravenswood, or the disputes which had existed betwixt her father and his, and perhaps could in her gentleness of mind hardly have comprehended the angry and bitter passions which they had engendered.  But she knew that he was come of noble stem; was poor, though descended from the noble and the wealthy; and she felt that she could sympathise with the feelings of a proud mind, which urged him to recoil from the proffered gratitude of the new proprietors of his father’s house and domains.  Would he have equally shunned their acknowledgments and avoided their intimacy, had her father’s request been urged more mildly, less abruptly, and softened with the grace which women so well know how to throw into their manner, when they mean to mediate betwixt the headlong passions of the ruder sex?  This was a perilous question to ask her own mind—­perilous both in the idea and its consequences.