But though she had grown accustomed to the life now, there were times, especially when the sun shone down for a short hour or two into the dull courtyard, in spring and summer, when the girl would look up with longing eyes to the blue sky and wonder what the world looked like outside the four grey walls. Sometimes she would see a bird fly past overhead, or watch a lark soaring up into the air, singing as it went. Then the past would come back to her, and she would remember a time when she had run about the green fields, and had spent long days in the garden; when she had gathered wild flowers and wood-strawberries, and had heard the birds sing. It made her a little sad to think of it all, and for a time she felt as if she were in a cage, and wondered whether she was to spend all her life in it; but she was blessed with a cheerful disposition, and on the whole she was not unhappy. She made occupation for herself in one way and another: she sewed, she embroidered, she netted; she read the two or three books she had over and over again, and she even wrote a little. When one day Mr. Samson brought her a harp from his hoard of treasures, she was delighted indeed: and having soon managed to teach herself how to play on it, she spent many a happy evening singing such songs as she had picked up or invented for herself. Mr. Samson liked to hear the full, clear young voice singing in the gallery, though he seldom took any apparent notice of the singer. In his way perhaps he would have missed Esther a little if she had been taken from him; but he was not a kindly or affectionate personage, and the girl had no one to care for but Euphrosyne, a rather tiresome, foolish old woman, who often tried her patience a good deal with her whims and fidgets. Esther, however, was very patient with her, and clung to her simply because there was no one else to cling to. Mr. Samson had given them three rooms in a distant corner of the gloomy building, where they were quite out of the way of everybody; and Esther's rooms being the two inner ones, she could never leave them without the knowledge and permission of the old woman, through whose room she had to pass. There was no doubt that Mr. Samson carried on an extensive business of a peculiar kind. He was very secret about it, and what with his armed garrison, and the odd way in which the castle was built, as if to stand a siege, there seemed good reason to suspect that his valuable goods and rich merchandise were collected from the whole length and breadth of Hungary, and were, in fact, gathered from every country-house and peddler's pack and bundle which he could find means to plunder. Not that Samson ever resorted to violence if he could possibly help it--quite the contrary; and though he was reckoned among the most powerful robber-knights of the time, he was really more thief than robber, and did also a great deal in a quiet way by lending money at very high interest.