“How do you know that?” asked Florimel, speaking steadily, but writhing inwardly with the knowledge that the warning was too late. “I have tried her spirit,” answered Malcolm, “and know that it is of the devil. She loves herself too much to be true.” After a little pause Florimel said, “I know you mean well, Malcolm; but it is nothing to me whether she loves me or not. We don’t look for that now-a-days from servants.” “It is because I love you, my lady,” said Malcolm, “that I know Caley does not. If she should get hold of anything your ladyship would not wish talked about,--” “That she cannot,” said Florimel, but with an inward shudder. “She may tell the whole world all she can discover.” She would have cantered on as the words left her lips, but something in Malcolm’s looks held her. She turned pale; she trembled: her father was looking at her as only once had she seen him--in doubt whether his child lied. The illusion was terrible. She shook in her saddle. The next moment she was galloping along the grassy border of the heath in wild flight from her worst enemy, whom yet she could never by the wildest of flights escape; for when, coming a little to herself as she approached a sand pit, she pulled up, there was her enemy--neither before nor behind, neither above nor beneath nor within her: it was the self which had just told a lie to the servant of whom she had so lately boasted that he never told one in his life. Then she grew angry. What had she done to be thus tormented? _She_ a marchioness, thus pestered by her own menials --pulled in opposing directions by a groom and a maid. She would turn them both away, and have nobody about her, either to trust or suspect. She might have called them her good and her evil demon; for she knew--that is, she had it somewhere about her, but did not look it out--that it was her own cowardice and concealment, her own falseness to the traditional, never failing courage of her house, her ignobility, and unfitness to represent the Colonsays--her double dealing in short, that had made the marchioness in her own right the slave of her woman, the rebuked of her groom! She turned and rode back, looking the other way as she passed Malcolm.