"
"Love, my beautiful Catherine, despises genealogies," answered Roland
Graeme.
"Love may, but so will not the Lord Seyton," rejoined the damsel.
"The Queen, thy mistress and mine, she will intercede. Oh! drive me
not from you at the moment I thought myself most happy!--and if I
shall aid her deliverance, said not yourself that you and she would
become my debtors?"
"All Scotland will become your debtors," said Catherine; "but for the
active effects you might hope from our gratitude, you must remember I
am wholly subjected to my father; and the poor Queen is, for a long
time, more likely to be dependant on the pleasure of the nobles of her
party, than possessed of power to control them."
"Be it so," replied Roland; "my deeds shall control prejudice
itself--it is a bustling world, and I will have my share. The Knight
of Avenel, high as he now stands, rose from as obscure an origin as
mine."
"Ay!" said Catherine, "there spoke the doughty knight of romance, that
will cut his way to the imprisoned princess, through fiends and fiery
dragons!"
"But if I can set the princess at large, and procure her the freedom
of her own choice," said the page, "where, dearest Catherine, will
that choice alight?"
"Release the princess from duresse, and she will tell you," said the
damsel; and breaking off the conversation abruptly, she joined the
Queen so suddenly, that Mary exclaimed, half aloud--
"No more tidings of evil import--no dissension, I trust, in my limited
household?"--Then looking on Catherine's blushing cheek, and Roland's
expanded brow and glancing eye--"No--no," she said, "I see all is
well--_Ma petite mignone_, go to my apartment and fetch me
down--let me see--ay, fetch my pomander box.
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