the left, and embraced the high and steep projection
which was crowned by the ruins; the upper loop enclosed a lawny
promontory, fringed by thorn and willow. It was easy to reach it from
the castle side, for the river ran in this part very quietly among
innumerable boulders and over dam-like walls of rock. The place was all
enclosed, the wind a stranger, the turf smooth and solid; so it was
chosen by Nance to be her bleaching-green.

One day she brought a bucketful of linen, and had but begun to wring and
lay them out when Mr. Archer stepped from the thicket on the far side,
drew very deliberately near, and sat down in silence on the grass. Nance
looked up to greet him with a smile, but finding her smile was not
returned, she fell into embarrassment and stuck the more busily to her
employment. Man or woman, the whole world looks well at any work to
which they are accustomed; but the girl was ashamed of what she did. She
was ashamed, besides, of the sun-bonnet that so well became her, and
ashamed of her bare arms, which were her greatest beauty.

"Nausicaa," said Mr. Archer at last, "I find you like Nausicaa."

"And who was she?" asked Nance, and laughed in spite of herself, an
empty and embarrassed laugh, that sounded in Mr. Archer's ears, indeed,
like music, but to her own like the last grossness of rusticity.

"She was a princess of the Grecian islands," he replied. "A king, being
shipwrecked, found her washing by the shore. Certainly I, too, was
shipwrecked," he continued, plucking at the grass. "There was never a
more desperate castaway--to fall from polite life, fortune, a shrine of
honour, a grateful conscience, duties willingly taken up and faithfully
discharged; and to fall to this--idleness, poverty, inutility, remorse."
He seemed to have forgotten her presence, but here he remembered her
again. "Nance," said he, "would you have a man sit down and suffer or
rise up and strive?"

"Nay," she said. "I would always rather see him doing."

"Ha!" said Mr. Archer, "but yet you speak from an imperfect knowledge.
Conceive a man damned to a choice of only evil--misconduct upon either
side, not a fault behind him, and yet naught before him but this choice
of sins. How would you say then?"

"I would say that he was much deceived, Mr. Archer," returned Nance. "I
would say there was a third choice, and that the right one."

"I tell you," said Mr. Archer, "the man I have in view hath two ways
open, and no more. One t