“A thousand, thousand thanks, sweet coz. You sing, to-night, sweeter than ever. But there if Wyn—the saucy fellow—has not run off with my shawl.”
The eyes of the youth lighted up with pleasure, and the blood mounted even to his brow, at this encomium,—and exclaiming,
“Stay—I will win back the truant,” he bounded gaily down the terrace after the playful hound.
The maiden followed him with her eyes, and sighed, “Poor Henry.” In those two words what a volume of hopeless love and years of anguish for the youth were spoken.
Henry De Lorraine was the only son of a once proud, but now decayed lineage, and, being left an orphan at an early age, had been reared in the house of his cousin, Lord Deraine. His life there had been that of most noble youths of his day, who, either through necessity, or for the purposes of advancement, were brought up as pages in the establishments of the wealthier nobility. Lorraine, however, possessed one advantage over the other pages of his cousin: he had from the first been the companion of the Lady Isabel, the only child of his patron. Although a year or two older than himself, the want of either brother or sister, had induced Isabel to confide in him all her little difficulties; and they had grown up thus, more on the footing of children of the same parent, than as a wealthy heiress, and a poor dependant.
During the last year of their lives, however, a change had silently, and almost imperceptibly, come over their feelings toward each other. An absence of nearly a twelvemonth with his patron at a foreign court, had in part altered the sentiments of Lorraine from those of a devoted brother to the emotions of love. He left Isabel, when both thought as children; he returned and found her already a woman. During that interval new scenes, new thoughts, new emotions had successively occupied the heart of the page; and though when he came back he was still a boy in years, he had already began to feel the intenser passions of the man. Never had he seen such beauty as burst upon him when Isabel entered the room on his return. It was as if a goddess of olden Greece had been ushered into his presence, as if the inanimate statue of Pygmalion had flushed, all at once, into a breathing being. Lorraine had dreamed of loveliness, but he had never, in his brightest visions, pictured aught so fair. He had expected Isabel to be improved, although he had left her the loveliest being of the riding; but he had not imagined that she would bud forth into a flower of such surpassing, such transcendent beauty. He was awed; he was filled as if with the presence of a divinity, to which he bowed irresistibly, but in strange delight. From that hour the bosom of the warm, high-souled boy, was ruled by a passion that devoured his very existence.