ain?" Constance felt she
required nothing more to yield to her inclination. Lady Erpingham,
less adventurous, remained in the ruined chamber; and the old woman,
naturally enough, honoured the elder lady with her company.

Constance, therefore, descended the rude steps alone. As she paused by
the fountain, an indescribable and delicious feeling of repose stole
over a mind that seldom experienced any sentiment so natural or so soft.
The hour, the stillness, the scene, all conspired to lull the heart into
that dreaming and half-unconscious reverie in which poets would suppose
the hermits of elder times to have wasted a life, indolent, and yet
scarcely, after all, unwise. "Methinks," she inly soliloquised, "while
I look around, I feel as if I could give up my objects of life; renounce
my hopes; forget to be artificial and ambitious; live in these ruins,
and," (whispered the spirit within,) "loved and loving, fulfil the
ordinary doom of woman."

Indulging a mood, which the proud and restless Constance, who despised
love as the poorest of human weaknesses, though easily susceptible
to all other species of romance, had scarcely ever known before, she
wandered away from the lawn into one of the alleys cut amidst the grove
around. Caught by the murmur of an unseen brook, she tracked it through
the trees, as its sound grew louder and louder on her ear, till at
length it stole upon her sight. The sun, only winning through the trees
at intervals, played capriciously upon the cold and dark waters as they
glided on, and gave to her, as the same effect has done to a thousand
poets, ample matter for a simile or a moral.

She approached the brook, and came unawares upon the figure of a young
man, leaning against a stunted tree that overhung the waters, and
occupied with the idle amusement of dropping pebbles in the stream. She
saw only his profile; but that view is, in a fine countenance, almost
always the most striking and impressive, and it was eminently so in the
face before her. The stranger, who was scarcely removed from boyhood,
was dressed in deep mourning. He seemed slight, and small of stature.
A travelling cap of sables contrasted, not hid, light brown hair of
singular richness and beauty. His features were of that pure and severe
Greek of which the only fault is that in the very perfection of the
chiselling of the features there seems something hard and stern. The
complexion was pale, even to wanness; and the whole cast and