d slap you in the face, and call
you a scoundrel. But, by the eternal God, you shall not say that you
have done this with impunity! Once more, and for the last time, I now
ask you, will you comply with Lord Hertford's wish? Will you marry Lady
Margaret, and accompany me with Thomas Seymour to the altar?"

"No, I will not, and I will never do it!" exclaimed her brother,
solemnly. "The Howards bow not before the Seymours; and never will Henry
Howard marry a wife that he does not love!"

"Ah, you love her not!" said she, breathless, gnashing her teeth. "You
do not love Lady Margaret; and for this reason must your sister renounce
her love, and give up this man whom she adores. Ah, you love not this
sister of Thomas Seymour? She is not the Geraldine whom you adore--to
whom you dedicate your verses! Well, now, I will find her out--your
Geraldine. I will discover her; and then, woe to you and to her! You
refuse me your hand to lead me to the altar with Thomas Seymour; well,
now, I will one day extend you my hand to conduct you and your Geraldine
to the scaffold!"

And as she saw how the earl startled and turned pale, she continued with
a scornful laugh: "Ah, you shrink, and horror creeps over you! Does
your conscience admonish you that the hero, rigid in virtue, may yet
sometimes make a false step? You thought to hide your secret, if you
enveloped it in the veil of night, like your Geraldine, who, as you
wailingly complain in that poem there, never shows herself to you
without a veil as black as night. Just wait, wait! I will strike a light
for you, before which all your night-like veils shall be torn in shreds;
I will light up the night of your secret with a torch which will be
large enough to set on fire the fagot piles about the stake to which you
and your Geraldine are to go!"

"Ah, now you let me see for the first time your real countenance," said
Henry Howard, shrugging his shoulders. "The angel's mask falls from your
face; and I behold the fury that was hidden beneath it. Now you are your
mother's own daughter; and at this moment I comprehend for the first
time what my father has suffered, and why he shunned not even the
disgrace of a divorce, just to be delivered from such a Megaera."

"Oh, I thank you, thank you!" cried she, with a savage laugh. "You are
filling up the measure of your iniquity. It is not enough that you drive
your sister to despair; you revile your mother also! You say that we are
furies; well, i