Neither of them dismounted till they reached the house of Leoline, and there Sir Norman secured his horse, and looked up at it with a beating heart.

Not that it was very unusual for his heart to beat, seeing it never did anything else; but on that occasion its motion was so much accelerated, that any doctor feeling his pulse might have justly set him down as a bad case of heart-disease.

A small, bright ray of light streamed like a beacon of hope from an upper window, and the lover looked at it as a clouded mariner might at the shining of the North Star.
"Are you coming in, Ormiston ?" he inquired, feeling, for the first time in his life, almost bashful.

"It seems to me it would only be right, you know." "I don't mind going in and introducing` you," said Ormiston; "but after you have been delivered over, you may fight your own battles, and take care of yourself.

Come on." The door was unfastened, and Ormiston sprang upstairs with the air of a man-quite at home, followed more decorously by Sir Norman.