Thus amongst the apple-blossoms talked Amanda Serafina.

‘Prithee, be not too severe with my cousin, Amanda,’ pleaded Scudamore.  ’She is much too sober to please my fancy, but wherefore should I for that hate her?  And if she hath something the look of a long-faced fanatic, thou must think, she hath but now, as it were, lost her mother.’

’But now!  And I never knew mine!  Ah, Rowland, how lonely is the world!’

‘Lovely Amanda!’ said Rowland.

So they passed from the orchard and parted, fearful of being missed.

How should such a pair do, but after its kind?  Life was dull without love-making, so they made it.  And the more they made, the more they wanted to make, until casual encounters would no longer serve their turn.

CHAPTER XIX.

The enchanted chair.

In the castle things went on much the same, nor did the gathering tumult without wake more than an echo within.  Yet a cloud slowly deepened upon the brow of the marquis, and a look of disquiet, to be explained neither by the more frequent returns of his gout, nor by the more lengthened absences of his favourite son.  In his judgment the king was losing ground, not only in England but in the deeper England of its men.  Lady Margaret also, for all her natural good spirits and light-heartedness, showed a more continuous anxiety than was to be accounted for by her lord’s absences and the dangers he had to encounter:  little Molly, the treasure of her heart next to her lord, had never been other than a delicate child, but now had begun to show signs of worse than weakness of constitution, and the heart of the mother was perpetually brooding over the ever-present idea of her sickly darling.

But she always did her endeavour to clear the sky of her countenance before sitting down with her father-in-law at the dinner-table, where still the marquis had his jest almost as regularly as his claret, although varying more in quality and quantity both—­now teasing his son Charles about the holes in his pasteboard, as he styled the castle walls; now his daughter Anne about a design, he and no one else attributed to her, of turning protestant and marrying Dr. Bayly; now Dr. Bayly about his having been discovered blowing the organ in the chapel at high mass, as he said; for when no new joke was at hand he was fain to content himself with falling back upon old ones.  The first of these mentioned was founded on the fact, as undeniable as deplorable, of the weakness of many portions of the defences, to remedy which, as far as might be, was for the present lord Charles’s chief endeavour, wherein he had the best possible adviser, engineer, superintendent, and workman, all in the person of Caspar Kaltoff.  The second jest of the marquis was a pure invention upon the liking of lady Anne for the company and conversation of the worthy chaplain.  The last mentioned was but an exaggeration of the following fact.