‘It’s the sickness,’[5] at last she condescended to explain, between bursts of laughter at her companion’s puzzled countenance. ‘There are but two of the Queen’s ladies fit for duty at all--Mary Carmichael and me; and she is so occupied with your chief’s kinsman, Mr Maxwell, that she couldn’t be more useless if she was ill in bed. The Court is as dull as ditch-water, and I shall have to walk up this weary hill to do everybody’s business twice a week instead of once; that is the upshot of it.’ [5] An epidemic that prevailed at the Court, answering to the indisposition which we now term _influenza_, and mentioned by Randolph in his letters to Cecil. A ray of intense pleasure gleamed on her listener’s face at this announcement; but it clouded over a minute afterwards, and he asked with undisguised anxiety, ‘If there was no danger for herself?’ The girl could not but feel gratified at his obvious interest in her safety; but she laughed again, and answered, merrily-- ‘Do you think nobody can be bold who is not six foot high? I fear sickness, I tell you, as little as you fear Lord Scrope, and hate it perhaps more; and yet you have the best of it, too. I had rather face death on an open moor than in closed bed-curtains. I wonder if anybody would miss me much?’ she added, more to herself than him, for the grave chord had somehow been struck in her thoughtless character. He did not answer, and when she looked at him, his face was turned away. ‘Do you think they would?’ she proceeded, with the pertinacity of a spoiled child. ‘Stranger things have come to pass. You might be riding merrily in Liddesdale, whilst Mary Seton was lying stark and cold under the Abbey stones.’ ‘It would be a dark day in Liddesdale,’ was all the answer he made; but he would not let her see his face, and his voice sounded as it had never done before. A tinge of remorse, such as that which the urchin feels when he takes a bird’s-nest, smote almost unconsciously at the girl’s heart; yet was the sensation, though pathetic, by no means unpleasant. She laughed and bantered him more than usual during their walk; but on that day, and indeed every day afterwards till he returned to the border, she suffered him to carry her basket; and the honest retriever, proud of his degradation, followed at her heel, with ever-increasing fidelity and devotion. The bird’s-nest was taken now, and it is no use attempting to put such articles back again; moreover, it had been thoroughly harried, emptied clean of its treasures, and all the eggs were in that one basket. CHAPTER XII. ‘Oh! is my basnet a widow’s curch, Or my lance a wand of the willow tree, Or my arm a lady’s lily hand, That an English lord should lightly me?’