Though, in the bustle of preparation, scarcely a moment remained unoccupied, Laura could not always forbear from starting at the sound of the knocker, or following with her eyes the form of a horseman winding through the trees. In vain she looked--in vain she listened. The expected stranger came not--the expected voice was unheard. She tried to rejoice at the desertion: 'I am glad of it,' she would say to herself, while bitter tears were bursting from her eyes. She often reproached herself with the severity of her language at her last interview with Hargrave. She asked herself what right she had to embitter disappointment by unkindness, or to avenge insult by disdain. Her behaviour appeared to her, in the retrospect, ungentle, unfeminine, unchristian. Yet she did not for a moment repent her rejection, nor waver for a moment in her resolution to adhere to it. Her soul sickened at the thought, that she had been the object of licentious passion merely; and she loathed to look upon her own lovely form, while she thought that it had seduced the senses, but failed to touch the soul of Hargrave. Amidst these employments and feelings the week had closed; and the Sabbath evening was the last which Laura was to spend at Glenalbert. That evening had long been her chosen season of meditation, the village church-yard the scene where she loved to 'go forth to meditate.' The way which led to it, and to it alone, was a shady green lane, gay with veronica and hare-bell, undefaced by wheels, but marked in the middle with one distinct track, and impressed towards the sides with several straggling half-formed footpaths. The church itself stood detached from the village, on a little knoll, on the west side of which the burial-ground sloped towards the woody bank that bounded a brawling mountain stream. Thither Laura stole, when the sun, which had been hid by the rugged hill, again rolling forth from behind the precipitous ascent, poured through the long dale his rays upon this rustic cemetery; the only spot in the valley sufficiently elevated to catch his parting beam.