The lady's face was full of satisfaction, her beautiful eyes beamed with joy; but yet--oh, that there should ever be but yet--those eyes would sometimes turn thoughtfully towards the ground, and a shade would come over that angelic face; it could not be called a cloud, it was so light, so evanescent. Perhaps the reader may divine, without explanation, the cause of that vague shadow, or, at all events, a word will give him a clue. Her father was not there; and memories of his fate and his loneliness would interweave themselves with the warp of thought, and chequer with darker figures the bright web of her own happiness. One more figure completed the group,--it was that of good Father George, now prior of his order; the abbacy he had declined; although, since the events we have lately narrated, the worthy but weak Lord Abbot had died--it was whispered from a surfeit, of a very nice but dangerous animal, called in the language of the country "_Nine-eyes_," which has slain almost as many great men as the sword. The good monk hardly looked as fresh and well as when first we beheld him, for he had lately passed through some scenes of great excitement; and it is a curious fact, that men of advanced life, who generally are less susceptible of strong emotions, suffer more severely than others when they do feel them. Nevertheless, during the meal he had been more gay than usual, and now he was prolonging the conversation aloud with the Count, while, from time to time, Ferdinand and Adelaide spoke together in low tones, of things which referred only to themselves. "Ah! my good lord," said the Prior, "if the verse-maker Ovid had lived in these days, he might have added more than one book to his Metamorphoses, and, in this very place, might have found matter for many a long and ponderous verse. We have all, indeed, undergone transformation--you from a jester to a count; I from a poor monk to a rich prior; and you, my good youth, from a stripling to a married man. Nor amongst the least is the change of this old hall. Why, not two months ago, that is when last I saw it, it was all dark and mouldy, the stone-work peeling away, the rafters rotting and inclined to fall, with nought in it but the old banners and the great chair of state. Men were afraid to tread it for fear of spectres, and the whistling wind, the bats, and the dust, were its only tenants. Now it looks as gay and as sunshiny as a bridal banquet-chamber, with its gay garlands and festive flowers, and all fears seem laid aside in its new freshness.