en--"my
apartment--our dress--the hour--my honour!"

But ere she could detail her remonstrances, the curtain fell, and there
was no division any longer betwixt the armed knight and the party of
ladies. The warmth of an Eastern night occasioned the undress of Queen
Berengaria and her household to be rather more simple and unstudied than
their station, and the presence of a male spectator of rank, required.
This the Queen remembered, and with a loud shriek fled from the
apartment where Sir Kenneth was disclosed to view in a compartment of
the ample pavilion, now no longer separated from that in which they
stood. The grief and agitation of the Lady Edith, as well as the deep
interest she felt in a hasty explanation with the Scottish knight,
perhaps occasioned her forgetting that her locks were more dishevelled
and her person less heedfully covered than was the wont of high-born
damsels, in an age which was not, after all, the most prudish or
scrupulous period of the ancient time. A thin, loose garment of
pink-coloured silk made the principal part of her vestments, with
Oriental slippers, into which she had hastily thrust her bare feet, and
a scarf hurriedly and loosely thrown about her shoulders. Her head had
no other covering than the veil of rich and dishevelled locks falling
round it on every side, that half hid a countenance which a mingled
sense of modesty and of resentment, and other deep and agitated
feelings, had covered with crimson.

But although Edith felt her situation with all that delicacy which is
her sex's greatest charm, it did not seem that for a moment she placed
her own bashfulness in comparison with the duty which, as she thought,
she owed to him who had been led into error and danger on her account.
She drew, indeed, her scarf more closely over her neck and bosom, and
she hastily laid from her hand a lamp which shed too much lustre over
her figure; but, while Sir Kenneth stood motionless on the same spot in
which he was first discovered, she rather stepped towards than retired
from him, as she exclaimed, "Hasten to your post, valiant knight!--you
are deceived in being trained hither--ask no questions."

"I need ask none," said the knight, sinking upon one knee, with the
reverential devotion of a saint at the altar, and bending his eyes on
the ground, lest his looks should increase the lady's embarrassment.

"Have you heard all?" said Edith impatiently. "Gracious saints! then
wherefore wait you her