For several minutes the lady sat and gazed around her, leaning lightly on her rounded arm, and fixing her soft and thoughtful eyes, from time to time, upon each fair spot in the glowing landscape. Was she merely drinking in the flood of beauty that poured upon the eye, contemplating the magnificence of nature, feeling with delight and awe the perfection of God's works? Or were her thoughts turned inward to her own fate and circumstances, and her eye roving inattentive over things familiar to her? Neither was exactly the case; she felt the loveliness of the scene, she marked with pleasure many a fair object in the view, she looked "through Nature up to Nature's God," but still her own hopes and wishes, her own fears and anxieties intruded themselves, whether she would or not, upon her attention with importunate appeal, and connected her own fate with all her contemplations, deriving from the objects before her eyes, sometimes fanciful illustrations, sometimes consolations higher and holier than any that man can give. Thus she sat for several minutes, and why or wherefore matters not much, nor can we indeed tell--for who can trace the wanderings of a quick and imaginative mind?--but that fit of her reverie ended with a bright drop upon her eyelids. The next moment, however, sweet Arabella Stuart roused herself, though with a sigh, to other thoughts. Oh, how hard it is when the mind, like a young bird, has soared forth at liberty, into the face of heaven, and tried its wing at large, amongst all the joyous things of nature, to be called back to the close cage of the dull world's doings, the strifes, the cares, the meannesses, which form the bars that prison in the heart. Such was her fate, however, continually through life. As if to make the transition more easy, however, she repeated--we may call it sung, for she preserved, though her voice rose scarcely above a murmur, the air of the song--the lines of some long-forgotten poet, which were but too applicable to herself. "I must not love where I would love, I must not dwell where I would stay." "Alas, it is all in vain," she added. "And now to the letter." Thus saying, she drew forth from her bosom a note, the seal of which had been broken, but of the contents of which she had, as yet, only read the first words. Unfolding it, her eye ran over the lines it contained, and her cheek grew very pale; a look of anxiety and apprehension rose in her countenance; and at length, clasping her hands together, she exclaimed, "The King and all the Court live in daily dread of the plague; but if these rash men did but know how much more I dread the plague of their ambitious designs, they would not surely try to communicate the infection to me by such letters as this. What is to be done with this thing now? If I reveal it, I bring the poor wretch to the block. If I conceal it, I make myself a sharer of their treasons."