Mumblazen, tricked out in an antique dress, like an ancient herald, held aloft a scutcheon, with its usual decorations of skulls, cross-bones, and hour-glasses, surrounding a coat-of-arms, of which she could only distinguish that it was surmounted with an Earl's coronet.
The old man looked at her with a ghastly smile, and said, "Amy, are they not rightly quartered ?" Just as he spoke, the horns again poured on her ear the melancholy yet wild strain of the MORT, or death-note, and she awoke.
The Countess awoke to hear a real bugle-note, or rather the combined breath of many bugles, sounding not the MORT.

but the jolly REVEILLE, to remind the inmates of the Castle of Kenilworth that the pleasures of the day were to commence with a magnificent stag-hunting in the neighbouring Chase.

Amy started up from her couch, listened to the sound, saw the first beams of the summer morning already twinkle through the lattice of her window, and recollected, with feelings of giddy agony, where she was, and how circumstanced.
"He thinks not of me," she said; "he will not come nigh me! A Queen is his guest, and what cares he in what corner of his huge Castle a wretch like me pines in doubt, which is fast fading into despair ?" At once a sound at the door, as of some one attempting to open it softly, filled her with an ineffable mixture of joy and fear; and hastening to remove the obstacle she had placed against the door, and to unlock it, she had the precaution to ask! "Is it thou, my love ?" "Yes, my Countess," murmured a whisper in reply.
She threw open the door, and exclaiming, "Leicester!" flung her arms around the neck of the man who stood without, muffled in his cloak.
"No--not quite Leicester," answered Michael Lambourne, for he it was, returning the caress with vehemence--"not quite Leicester, my lovely and most loving duchess, but as good a man." With an exertion of force, of which she would at another time have thought herself incapable, the Countess freed herself from the profane and profaning grasp of the drunken debauchee, and retreated into the midst of her apartment where despair gave her courage to make a stand.
As Lambourne, on entering, dropped the lap of his cloak from his face, she knew Varney's profligate servant, the very last person, excepting his detested master, by whom she would have wished to be discovered.

But she was still closely muffled in her travelling dress, and as Lambourne had scarce ever been admitted to her presence at Cumnor Place, her person, she hoped, might not be so well known to him as his was to her, owing to Janet's pointing him frequently out as he crossed the court, and telling stories of his wickedness.

She might have had still greater confidence in her disguise had her experience enabled her to discover that he was much intoxicated; but this could scarce have consoled her for the risk which she might incur from such a character in such a time, place, and circumstances.
Lambourne flung the door behind him as he entered, and folding his arms, as if in mockery of the attitude of distraction into which Amy had thrown herself, he proceeded thus: "Hark ye, most fair Calipolis--or most lovely Countess of clouts, and divine Duchess of dark corners--if thou takest all that trouble of skewering thyself together, like a trussed fowl, that there may be more pleasure in the carving, even save thyself the labour.