“Oh!” she cried, “if kind Heaven has indeed joy in store for the poor, persecuted Ada, surely it will be more delightful by the contrast with what has passed! Friends will be dearer to me, because I have known none! The sunshine will to me possess a greater charm than to those who have always been so happy as to revel in its beams! The charms of music will entrance me, where they present but ordinary sounds to others, for I shall contrast then with the echoes of this dreary house. The voices of those who will love me, and use kindly phrases when they speak to me, will ring in my ears with an unknown beauty! Mere freedom—the dear gift of being able, at my own free-will, to seek the leafy glade of some old forest—or walk in the broad sunlight of an open plain, will be a rich reward for all that I have suffered! Oh! How can the world be unhappy while Heaven has left it youth, sunshine, and love?” Thus the young, ardent, enthusiastic girl beguiled the tediousness of her imprisonment. She lived in a world of romance of her own creating, a romance, too, that was mixed up with a pure and holy system of natural theology culled from her own heart, and those mysterious impulses which tell all, but those who wilfully shut their ears against the solemn glorious truth—that there is a great and good God above all—a Being to be loved more than to be feared. Ada would now sit for hours picturing to herself the meeting of poor Maud with Albert Seyton. She would frame all the dialogue that would pass between them, until Albert had, piece by piece, extracted from the wandering mind of the poor creature the exact situation of the old house in which Ada was immured; then she would imagine his joy, his rapture, until busy Fancy almost conjured up the reality of his voice in her charmed ears. The dull sons of system and calculation—the plodders through life without the capacity to look beyond the present, or reason on the past, may condemn the airy freaks of the imagination, because of their unreality; but what would the lonely, the persecuted, and the unhappy do, if Heaven, in its great mercy, had not laid up within the chambers of the brain, such stores of joy and ecstatic thought ready to be drawn forth infinitely to cheat what is real of its terrors, by contrasting it with the rare creations of the ideal. Oh, is it not a rare and amiable faculty of mind, that can thus shift, as it were, the scenes of life, and with a thought, change a dungeon to a sweet glade in some deep forest, where birds are singing for the pure love of song. Let then the dreamy “castle builder” pile story upon story of his æriel fabric,—he will be the nearer Heaven. CHAPTER XXXIII. Britton at the Chequers.—The Visit.—A Mysterious Stranger.—The Good Company.