e
and wine, she disappeared in a moment by the way she came. The noble
rushed after her in the hope of detaining the fugitive, or, at least,
of catching a parting glimpse of her retreating form, but the
ivy-encircled cleft, through which she seemed to have flitted, looked
as though it had not been disturbed for centuries, and as he tried to
force his way to the gloomy cavern below, a crowd of bats and owls and
other foul birds of evil omen, aroused from their repose, rose
upwards, and, amidst dismal hootings and fearful cries, almost flung
him backward with the violence of their flight. He spent the remainder
of the afternoon in search of the lost one, but without success. At
the coming of night he wended his way homeward, weary, heart-sick, and
overwhelmed with an indefinable sensation of sadness.

From that day forth he was an altered man--altered in appearance as
well as in mind and in manners. Pleasure was a stranger to his soul,
and he knew no longer what it was to enjoy peace. Wherever he went,
whatever pursuit he was engaged in, whether in the chase, in the hall,
in lady's bower, or in chapel, his eye only saw one object--the White
Maiden. At the board she stood in imagination always before him,
offering to his fevered lips the cool, brimming beaker; and in the
long-drawn aisles of the chapel she was ever present, beckoning him
from his devotions to partake of the generous beverage which she still
bore in her right hand. Every matron or maiden he met seemed by some
wondrous process to take her shape, and even the very trees of the
forest all looked to his thought like her.

Thenceforward he commenced to haunt the ruins in which she had
appeared to him, still hoping to see, once again, her for whom he felt
he was dying, and living alone in that hope. The sun scorched him, but
it was nothing to the fever that burned within him. The rain drenched
him, but he cared not for it. Time and change and circumstance seemed
all forgotten by him, everything passed by him unheeded. His whole
existence was completely swallowed up in one thought--the White Maiden
of the ruined castle, and that, alas! was only vexation of spirit. A
deadly fever seized him. It was a mortal disease. Still he raved, in
his delirium, but of her. One morn a woodman, who occasionally
provided him with food, found him a corpse at the entrance of the
crevice in the wall whence the maiden had seemed to come, and where
she had disappeared. It was long ru