If you dare do aught for one that hazards much, you need but pass into this garden at prime tomorrow, wearing in your cap a blue and white feather, but expect no farther communication.

Your stars have, they say, destined you for greatness, and disposed you to gratitude .-- Farewell--be faithful, prompt, and resolute, and doubt not thy fortune." Within this letter was enclosed a ring with a table diamond, on which were cut, in form of a lozenge, the ancient arms of the House of Croye.
The first feeling of Quentin upon this occasion was unmingled ecstasy--a pride and joy which seemed to raise him to the stars--a determination to do or die, influenced by which he treated with scorn the thousand obstacles that placed themselves betwixt him and the goal of his wishes.
In this mood of rapture, and unable to endure any interruption which might withdraw his mind, were it but for a moment, from so ecstatic a subject of contemplation, Durward, retiring to the interior of the castle, hastily assigned his former pretext of a headache for not joining the household of the Bishop at the supper meal, and, lighting his lamp, betook himself to the chamber which had been assigned him, to read, and to read again and again, the precious billet, and to kiss a thousand times the no less precious ring.
But such high wrought feelings could not remain long in the same ecstatic tone.

A thought pressed upon him, though he repelled it as ungrateful--as even blasphemous--that the frankness of the confession implied less delicacy on the part of her who made it, than was consistent with the high romantic feeling of adoration with which he had hitherto worshipped the Lady Isabelle.

No sooner did this ungracious thought intrude itself, than he hastened to stifle it, as he would have stifled a hissing and hateful adder that had intruded itself into his couch.

Was it for him--him the Favoured--on whose account she had stooped from her sphere, to ascribe blame to her for the very act of condescension, Without which he dared not have raised his eyes towards her?
Did not her very dignity of birth and of condition reverse, in her case, the usual rules which impose silence on the lady until her lover shall have first spoken?
To these arguments, which he boldly formed into syllogisms and avowed to himself, his vanity might possibly suggest one which he cared not to embody even mentally with the same frankness--that the merit of the party beloved might perhaps warrant, on the part of the lady, some little departure from common rules, and, after all, as in the case of Malvolio [Olivia's steward in Twelfth Night], there was example for it in chronicle.