or two from the loveliest of hands against his hair-thatch, and was
seated in the drawing-room with Mrs. Sclater when the ladies
arrived. Ginevra and he shook hands, she with the sweetest of
rose-flushes, he with the radiance of delighted surprise. But, a
moment after, when Mrs. Sclater and her guests had seated
themselves, Gibbie, their only gentleman, for Mr. Sclater had not
yet made his appearance, had vanished from the room. Tea was not
brought until some time after, when Mr. Sclater came home, and then
Mrs. Sclater sent Jane to find Sir Gilbert; but she returned to say
he was not in the house. The lady's heart sank, her countenance
fell, and all was gloom: her project had miscarried! he was gone!
who could tell whither?--perhaps to the baker's daughter, or to the
horrid woman Croale!

The case was however very much otherwise. The moment Gibbie ended
his greetings, he had darted off to tell Donal: it was not his
custom to enjoy alone anything sharable.

The news that Ginevra was at that moment seated in Mrs. Sclater's
house, at that moment, as his eagerness had misunderstood Gibbie's,
expecting his arrival, raised such a commotion in Donal's
atmosphere, that for a time it was but a huddle of small whirlwinds.
His heart was beating like the trample of a trotting horse. He
never thought of inquiring whether Gibbie had been commissioned by
Mrs. Sclater to invite him, or reflected that his studies were not
half over for the night. An instant before the arrival of the
blessed fact, he had been absorbed in a rather abstruse
metaphysico-mathematical question; now not the metaphysics of the
universe would have appeared to him worth a moment's meditation. He
went pacing up and down the room, and seemed lost to everything.
Gibbie shook him at length, and told him, by two signs, that he
must put on his Sunday clothes. Then first shyness, like the shroud
of northern myth that lies in wait in a man's path, leaped up, and
wrapped itself around him. It was very well to receive ladies in a
meadow, quite another thing to walk into their company in a grand
room, such as, before entering Mrs. Sclater's, he had never beheld
even in Fairyland or the Arabian Nights. He knew the ways of the
one, and not the ways of the other. Chairs ornate were doubtless
poor things to daisied banks, yet the other day he had hardly
brought himself to sit on one of Mrs. Sclater's! It was a moment of
awful seeming. But what would he not