CHAPTER X.
Such scenes had tempered with a pensive grace The maiden lustre of that faultless face; Had hung a sad and dreamlike spell upon The gliding music of her silver tone, And shaded the soft soul which loved to lie In the deep pathos of that volumed eye .-- O'Neill; or, The Rebel.
The love thus kindled between them was of no common or calculating nature: it was vigorous and delicious, and at times so suddenly intense as to appear to their young hearts for a moment or so with almost an awful character .-- Inesilla.
The reader will figure to himself a small chamber, in a remote wing of a large and noble mansion.

The walls were covered with sketches whose extreme delicacy of outline and colouring betrayed the sex of the artist; a few shelves filled with books supported vases of flowers.

A harp stood neglected at the farther end of the room, and just above hung the slender prison of one of those golden wanderers from the Canary Isles which hear to our colder land some of the gentlest music of their skies and zephyrs.

The window, reaching to the ground, was open, and looked, through the clusters of jessamine and honeysuckle which surrounded the low veranda, beyond upon thick and frequent copses of blossoming shrubs, redolent of spring and sparkling in the sunny tears of a May shower which had only just wept itself away.

Embosomed in these little groves lay plots of flowers, girdled with turf as green as ever wooed the nightly dances of the fairies; and afar off, through one artful opening, the eye caught the glittering wanderings of water, on whose light and smiles the universal happiness of the young year seemed reflected.
But in that chamber, heedless of all around, and cold to the joy with which everything else, equally youthful, beautiful, and innocent, seemed breathing and inspired, sat a very young and lovely female.