this is not fancy: could fancy shew a moving
soul of sorrow? See how the passion plays upon that face, as she
thus stands with sad-eyed earnestness, maintaining converse with
the hollow sky. Looked ever aught so fair yet so forlorn? Methinks
there is a tear upon her cheek. Why comes it from the Eden of her
eye? I must speak to her;" and with mixed fear and fervour he
exclaimed: "May Heaven keep you from grave cause of sorrow, lady!
Forgive me, oh, forgive me, lady, or vision, for, by these dazzled
eyes, and, as I fear, by your offended form, I Scarcely can divine
whether you are of earth or air; pardon me if I have appeared here
by night, as unpremeditatedly as I came by day. Bid me begone,
--and yet permit me to remain, for, by my life, and the deep
admiration with which you have inspired me, I cannot leave you till
I learn your grief, and with it, peradventure, my own doom. Whom
did you speak of even now, fair form?"

"Who asks of me that question; who is it that thus listens when I
thought myself alone?" she demanded haughtily, looking downwards
from the verandah. "Sir, just now I spoke, and said--I know not
what. What you have overheard me say I fear was foolish; do not,
then, regard it. I know you now. You are the stranger who, this
morning, drove those violent intruders from these grounds. Ah,
who would have thought you would return by night, and thus, sir,
play the eaves-dropper! Oh, for shame! Nay, you are not the one I
took you for. Sir, it is mean to overlisten; mean, very mean; nay,
it is base, unmanly, to listen to a maid, when she commits her
vagaries to the moon."

"Scourge me, for I deserve it, with your tongue;" rejoined the
stranger--"but, lady, you were not alone, though I were absent;
no; you cannot be alone. Such excellence must draw hither elves
and midnight troops of fairies; by day, by night, each moment must
array around you the good wishes of the world. No, not alone; the
very sky is filled with watchers and the ground covered with
invisible feet, that have come here to do you homage; then why not
I found here to pay you mine? Are you still angry?"

"You have offended me," she answered;--"and yet perhaps I am too
severe with you. I fear I am ungrateful. 'Mean,' did I say? It was
mean in me to say so, and most forgetful of the favor conferred
here by you this morning. No, I vow it was not mean--at least in
_you_. And yet it was mean, it was very mean in you, sir, thus to
overstep the golden