The festival of Easter passed away--summer drew on; yet Bothwell did not come, and then the heart of poor Anna began to sicken within her.
The evening was declining drearily, as many others had declined, on Westeray.
A prey to the deepest dejection, Anna reclined on a stone seat in an angle of the battlement, through an embrasure of which she was watching the setting sun. Christina sat near her on the steps of this stone sofa, and her eyes were anxiously fixed on the pallid face of her mistress, whose fine but humid eyes were bent on the distant horizon; but their expression was dreamy, sad, and vacant. The eyes of another were fixed on her, with an intensity of which she was unaware; and indeed she knew not that any one was near save her female attendant.
Leaning against the battlement, and but a few paces distant, stood Konrad of Saltzberg, clad in the same long shirt of mail, and wearing the same salade that have already been described. For more than an hour he had been regarding Anna as a lover alone could have regarded her; but she was thinking only of her absent Earl, and watching the passing ships.
Many had been visible that day; for the vessels of Elizabeth, the English queen, were then sailing to the shores of Iceland, where her people had been permitted by the Danish king to fish for cod. The sun was dipping into the Atlantic, and, when half his circle was hidden by the horizon, the crimsoned waves became as an ocean of blushing wine, but their breakers were glittering in green and gold where they burst on the rocky beach of the isle.
The sun set; his rays died away from land and sea; the pink that edged the changing clouds, and the flush that reddened the water, grew paler and yet more pale, and the stars began to twinkle in the yet sunny blue of the sky. The last white sail, diminished to the size of a nautilus, had faded away in the distance, and Anna covered her face with her hands, and wept; from beneath the lappets of her little velvet cap, her bright hair fell forward in masses, and Konrad, though he saw not her tears, felt all his sympathy and his old love glow within him.
Resolving at all risks to discover himself, he removed his salade and advanced towards her. Anna raised her head at the clink of the shirt of mail, and, starting up, gazed upon him with astonishment while clinging to the parapet, for her strength almost left her. She would have become paler were it possible; but she was already so colourless, that death could not have made her more so.