nt clear, while the winds stormed, and the rain beat without, a lithe
and lovely shape hovered about the student's chamber; and his wild songs
were sung by a voice which Nature had made even sweeter than his own.

Alice's talent for music was indeed surprising; enthusiastic and quick
as he himself was in all he undertook, Maltravers was amazed at her
rapid progress. He soon taught her to play by ear; and Maltravers could
not but notice that her hand, always delicate in shape, had lost the
rude colour and roughness of labour. He thought of that pretty hand more
often than he ought to have done, and guided it over the keys when it
could have found its way very well without him.

On coming to the cottage he had directed the old servant to provide
suitable and proper clothes for Alice; but now that she was admitted "to
sit with the gentleman," the crone had the sense, without waiting for
new orders, to buy the "pretty young woman" garments, still indeed
simple, but of better materials and less rustic fashion; and Alice's
redundant tresses were now carefully arranged into orderly and glossy
curls, and even the texture was no longer the same; and happiness and
health bloomed on her downy cheeks, and smiled from the dewy lips,
which never quite closed over the fresh white teeth, except when she was
sad--but that seemed never, now she was not banished from Maltravers.

To say nothing of the unusual grace and delicacy of Alice's form and
features, there is nearly always something of Nature's own gentility
in very young women (except, indeed, when they get together and fall
a-giggling); it shames us men to see how much sooner they are polished
into conventional shape than our rough, masculine angles. A vulgar boy
requires Heaven knows what assiduity to make three steps--I do not say
like a gentleman, but like a body that has a soul in it; but give the
least advantage of society or tuition to a peasant girl, and a hundred
to one but she will glide into refinement before the boy can make a
bow without upsetting the table. There is sentiment in all women, and
sentiment gives delicacy to thought, and tact to manner. But sentiment
with men is generally acquired, an offspring of the intellectual
quality, not, as with the other sex, of the moral.

In the course of his musical and vocal lessons, Maltravers gently took
the occasion to correct poor Alice's frequent offences against grammar
and accent: and her memory was prodigiously quic