Several times she essayed to emerge, and join him; but a sudden awe of him, a conviction of that saintly purity which would shrink from the guilty vows she was meditating to pour into his ear, a recollection of the ejaculation with which he had accosted her before hovering figure, when she haunted his footsteps on the banks of the Cart; these thoughts made her pause.

He might again mistake her for the same dear object.

This image it was not her interest to recall.

And to approach near him, to unveil her heat to him, and to be repulsed--there was madness in the idea, and she retreated.
She had no sooner returned to the scene of festivity than she repented of having allowed what she deemed an idle alarm of overstrained delicacy to drive her from the lake.

She would have hastened back, had not two or three aged female peasants almost instantly engaged her, in spite of her struggles for extrication, to listen to long stories respecting her lord's youth.