"Yes, I promise not to speak to him unless you give me leave, black mammy," replied Golden, with quivering lips. "That's right, darling. Mammy can depend on your word. Lie down, and go to sleep, honey, and I'll fetch my pallet in yere, and sleep on de flo' by your bedside, so that no one kin 'trude on you ag'in." The girl laid her fair head silently on the pillow, and Dinah threw down a quilt on the floor and rolled herself in it. She was soon snoring profoundly. Not so with beautiful Golden. It was quite impossible for her to sleep again. She shut her eyelids resolutely, but the busy, beautiful brain was too active to admit of her losing consciousness again. She lay thinking of the splendid, dark-eyed stranger. "He has kissed me twice," she whispered to her heart, "and yet I do not even know his name. I wonder if I shall ever see him again. I hope I shall." As she remembered how earnestly he had apologized for his presence in her room, she could not believe him the wicked villain old Dinah had so loudly represented him. "He is handsome, and I believe that he is good," the girl said to herself, "and they tell me Elinor wants to marry him; I would like to marry him myself, just to spite my cousins." Poor little Golden! Her spite against her cousins was almost as old as her years. They had always hated her, and Golden had been quick to find it out and resent it. She had a quick and fiery temper, but it did not take her long to repent of her little fits of passion. She was a bright, winsome, lovable child. It was a wonder that anyone could hate her for her beautiful, innocent life. Yet there were those who did, and it was beginning to dawn vaguely on the mind of the girl that it was so. She knew that her life was passed differently from that of the other girls of her age and class. There were no teachers, no companions, no pleasures for her, and no promise of any change in the future. She wondered a little why it was so, but she never complained to her grandfather. It was, perhaps, only his way, she said to herself, little dreaming of the dark mystery that lay like a deep, impassible gulf between her and the dwellers in the outside world of which she knew so very, very little. CHAPTER VIII. A week elapsed, and there seemed but little prospect of the little prisoner's release from the haunted chambers of the ruined wing. The Glenalvans' guest lingered on, fascinated, it appeared, by the attractions of the beautiful Elinor. At least Elinor stoutly maintained this fact in the privacy of the family circle, while Clare as obstinately persisted that Mr. Chesleigh was perfectly impartial in his attentions to both. But however doubtful was Elinor's impression, the fact remained that he was pleased with his visit. He consented by their urgent invitation to prolong his stay another week. The girls were jubilant over his decision.