ase the old family
chair,) now quite overcame the fortitude she had till now exhibited. She
sate down sick at heart--turned with aversion from the refreshment her
fatigue required, and wept bitterly. Superstition, and two mysterious
incidents, even while she remained on the hill, if indeed they were more
than superstition's coinage, helped to depress her. Just before she
reached this forlorn house with the haggard, aged, horrid-looking idiot
prowling round it, with his rags fluttering in the wind, she thought
that the figure of the hated steward and spy moved along a wild path on
the opposite side of that great mountain cleft, traversed by a noisy
torrent almost the depth of the whole hill, near the top of which this
cottage was perched. His being there alone was nothing marvellous, but
an ominous horror seemed, in her mind, to hover round that man, who (as
if conscious of some deadly evil which was through him to overwhelm her
some time) studiously avoided direct intercourse with his victim.

The second incident which might have sprung from the dwelling of her
mind's eye on the absent features of him, who, it seemed, refused to
meet her again, was an apparition, or what she deemed such, of her dear
Night-harper! One of those dense flying clouds, so common even at
moderate elevations when the mists roll down the hills, suddenly
enveloping the lone lofty spot, left but a little area of a few yards
for vision, a dungeon walled with fog, which kept circulating furiously
on the blast like a great smoke, in continuous whirls. And through some
momentary fissure in this white wall, she imagined the pallid and almost
ghastly visage of her forsaken lover appeared intensely looking toward
her, as she stood on the rude threshold, looking out on the temporary
storm that had shut her up. Her vague apprehension of some evil arising
to David, her mind's perpetual object, from the man she believed herself
to have espied just before, was rarely absent from her thought.
Combining the two appearances, she became more and more fancy-fraught,
thus confined, as it were, in an elemental solitude of the mountain and
the cloud, where, for the present, we leave her, to narrate the fate of
her father.

The novel calamity of arrest for debt was borne by the respectable old
man, John Bevan, with a patience and dignity that no study of philosophy
could have inspired. Though somewhat inactive, he felt that, in the
honest discharge of his duty, he st