Chapter 9

Softly on tiptoe; Here Nell doth lie.

As often happens in life, when one suitor departs, another suitor knocks; and so it happened on this glorious night. The belated suitor was none other than Charles, the Stuart King. He seemed in the moonlight the picture of royalty, of romance, of dignity, of carelessness, of indifference--the royal vagabond of wit, of humour and of love. A well-thumbed "Hudibras" bulged from his pocket. He was alone, save for some pretty spaniels that played about him. He heeded them not. His thoughts were of Nell.

"Methought I heard voices tuned to love," he mused, as he glanced about. "What knave has spied out the secret of her bower? Ho, Rosamond, my Rosamond! Why came I here again to-night? What is there in this girl, this Nell? And yet her eyes, how like the pretty maid's who passed me the cup that day at the cottage where we rested. Have I lived really to love--I, Solomon's rival in the entertainment of the fair,--to have my heart-strings torn by this roguish player?"

His reflections were broken in upon by the hunters' song in the distance. The music was so in harmony with the night that the forest seemed enchanted.

"Hush; music!" he exclaimed, softly, as he lent himself reluctantly to the spell, which pervaded everything as in a fairyland. "Odds, moonlight was once for me as well the light for revels, bacchanals and frolics; yet now I linger another evening by Nell's terrace, mooning like a lover o'er the memory of her eyes and entranced by the hunters' song."