the form of the furious animal, and the
dreadful bellow with which he accompanied his career; and it was always
the image of the Master of Ravenswood, with his native nobleness of
countenance and form, that seemed to interpose betwixt her and assured
death. It is, perhaps, at all times dangerous for a young person to
suffer recollection to dwell repeatedly, and with too much complacency,
on the same individual; but in Lucy's situation it was almost
unavoidable. She had never happened to see a young man of mien and
features so romantic and so striking as young Ravenswood; but had she
seen an hundred his equals or his superiors in those particulars, no one
else would have been linked to her heart by the strong associations of
remembered danger and escape, of gratitude, wonder, and curiosity. I
say curiosity, for it is likely that the singularly restrained and
unaccommodating manners of the Master of Ravenswood, so much at variance
with the natural expression of his features and grace of his deportment,
as they excited wonder by the contrast, had their effect in riveting her
attention to the recollections. She knew little of Ravenswood, or the
disputes which had existed betwixt her father and his, and perhaps could
in her gentleness of mind hardly have comprehended the angry and bitter
passions which they had engendered. But she knew that he was come of
noble stem; was poor, though descended from the noble and the wealthy;
and she felt that she could sympathise with the feelings of a proud
mind, which urged him to recoil from the proffered gratitude of the new
proprietors of his father's house and domains. Would he have equally
shunned their acknowledgments and avoided their intimacy, had her
father's request been urged more mildly, less abruptly, and softened
with the grace which women so well know how to throw into their manner,
when they mean to mediate betwixt the headlong passions of the ruder
sex? This was a perilous question to ask her own mind--perilous both in
the idea and its consequences.

Lucy Ashton, in short, was involved in those mazes of the imagination
which are most dangerous to the young and the sensitive. Time, it
is true, absence, change of scene and new faces, might probably have
destroyed the illusion in her instance, as it has done in many others;
but her residence remained solitary, and her mind without those means of
dissipating her pleasing visions. This solitude was chiefly owing to the
absence