CHAPTER XVII.
LADY ARCTURA.
It was now almost three weeks since Donal had become an inmate of the castle, and he had scarcely set his eyes on the lady of the house.
Once he had seen her back, and more than once had caught a glimpse of her profile, but he had never really seen her face, and they had never spoken to each other.
One afternoon he was sauntering along under the overhanging boughs of an avenue of beeches, formerly the approach to a house in which the family had once lived, but which had now another entrance.

He had in his hand a copy of the Apocrypha, which he had never seen till he found this in the library.

In his usual fashion he had begun to read it through, and was now in the book called the Wisdom of Solomon, at the 17th chapter, narrating the discomfiture of certain magicians.

Taken with the beauty of the passage, he sat down on an old stone-roller, and read aloud.

Parts of the passage were these--they will enrich my page:-- "For they, that promised to drive away terrors and troubles from a sick soul, were sick themselves of fear, worthy to be laughed at.
"...For wickedness, condemned by her own witness, is very timorous, and being pressed with conscience, always forecasteth grievous things.
"...But they sleeping the same sleep that night, which was indeed intolerable, and which came upon them out of the bottoms of inevitable hell, "Were partly vexed with monstrous apparitions, and partly fainted, their heart failing them: for a sudden fear, and not looked for, came upon them.
"So then whosoever there fell down was straitly kept, shut up in a prison without iron bars.
"For whether he were husbandman, or shepherd, or a labourer in the field, he was overtaken, and endured that necessity, which could not be avoided: for they were all bound with one chain of darkness.
"Whether it were a whistling wind, or a melodious noise of birds among the spreading branches, or a pleasing fall of water running violently, "Or a terrible sound of stones cast down, or a running that could not be seen of skipping beasts, or a roaring voice of most savage wild beasts, or a rebounding echo from the hollow mountains; these things made them to swoon for fear.
"For the whole world shined with clear light, and none were hindered in their labour: "Over them only was spread an heavy night, an image of that darkness which should afterward receive them: but yet were they unto themselves more grievous than the darkness." He had read so much, and stopped to think a little; for through the incongruity of it, which he did not doubt arose from poverty of imagination in the translator, rendering him unable to see what the poet meant, ran yet an indubitable vein of awful truth, whether fully intended by the writer or not mattered little to such a reader as Donal--when, lifting his eyes, he saw lady Arctura standing before him with a strange listening look.