when _next_ you pray, thank
God that SHE is dead!"

"How! thank God that my kind and early friend--that your mother is
dead!" repeated the young man, in a voice of astonishment.

"Even so, Walter. You would not see her stretched upon the rack? would
not see her exposed to tortures, such as, at no very distant period, the
saints of our own church endured?--would not see her torn limb from limb
by wild horses?"

"Heavens! Constantia, are you mad?" exclaimed Walter, terrified at her
excited and distraught manner.

"I am not mad," she replied, in a changed and subdued tone; "but do not
forget (and let it be on your knees) to thank God that my mother is
dead; and that the cold clay presses the temples, which, if they were
alive, would throb and burn as mine do now."

She pressed her hands on her brow; while the youth, appalled and
astonished, gazed on her in silence.

"It is well thought on," she said, recovering her self-command much more
quickly than he could have imagined possible. "I will give it you; it
would be sinful to keep it after that dread to-morrow; even now, what do
I with your gift?" She drew forth from her bosom the locket of which we
have before spoken, and, looking on it fondly for a moment, thought,
though not aloud, "Poor little fragment of the glittering sin that
tempts mankind to their destruction! I heeded not your chasing nor your
gems; but once (forgive it, God, forgive it!) thought far too much of
him who gave it: I should have known better. I will not look on you
again, lest you take root within the heart on which you have rested:
though it was then in innocence, yet _now_ it is a crime; there--" she
held it towards him with a trembling hand. While her arm was thus
extended, Burrell rushed from behind the covert of a wide-spreading
laurel, and, with an action at once unmanly and insulting, snatched the
trinket from her hand and flung it on the sward.

Magic itself could not have occasioned a greater change in the look, the
manner, the entire appearance of the heiress of Cecil. She drew herself
up to her full height, and instantly demanded, "How Sir Willmott Burrell
_dared_ to act thus in her presence?"

The Cavalier drew his sword from its sheath; Burrell was not backward in
following the example. He returned Constantia's look of contempt with
one of sarcasm--the peculiar glance that becomes so effective from under
a half-closed lid--and then his eye glared like that of the hooded
snake,