I entered it, and there throughout the lonely day I lay concealed.

I heard the long tramp of footsteps, as your army passed me on the roads beneath; and then, after those hours of fear came the weary hours of solitude! 'Oh, those--lonely--lonely--lonely hours! I have lived without companions, but those hours were more terrible to me than all the years of my former life! I dared not venture to leave my hiding-place--I dared not call! Alone in the world, I crouched in my refuge till the sun went down! Then came the mist, and the darkness, and the cold.
The bitter winds of night thrilled through and through me! The lonely obscurity around me seemed filled with phantoms whom I could not behold, who touched me and rustled over the surface of my skin! They half maddened me! I rose to depart; to meet my wrathful father, or the army that had passed me, or solitude in the cold, bright meadows--I cared not which!--when I discerned the light of your torch, the moment ere it was extinguished.

Dark though it then was, I found your tent.
And now I know that I have found yet more--a companion and a friend!' She looked up at the young Goth as she pronounced these words with the same grateful expression that had appeared on her countenance before; but this time her eyes were not dimmed by tears.

Already her disposition--poor as was the prospect of happiness which now lay before it--had begun to return, with an almost infantine facility of change, to the restoring influences of the brighter emotions.

Already the short tranquilities of the present began to exert for her their effacing charm over the long agitations of the past.