The ruin had formerly been surrounded by a moat; even now one side of this remained, and communicated with the river. By the side of this, our heroine took her seat on the fallen tree. How long she sat she knew not. It was a great delight to her once more to handle the pencil so long laid aside. She worked as if inspired, and the main features were at length described with taste and accuracy. In her eagerness she had untied her bonnet, (which was a close one, covering her face, after the fashion of those days,) and pushed it slightly back, {194} thus displaying her animated features, unconscious the while that a stranger was gazing at her, and that for upward of an hour he had been tracing her features in his gratified imagination. At length she rose to depart, but as she was putting up her sketch, her bonnet fell from her head, and would have rolled into the river had not the stranger caught it, as it reached the brink, and gracefully restored it to her. He was older than herself and wore an officer's uniform. Could there be any harm in thanking him, and in unfolding, at his request, the sketch which had occasioned the accident? Ellen thought not of harm. She was unversed in the world's ways, and had experienced more of its annoyances than its dangers. Insensibly a conversation was entered into. It was prolonged until the shadows proclaimed that the sun was verging to the west. The stranger was evidently pleased and surprised at Ellen's keen sense of natural and artistic beauty, and at the simple yet poetic manner in which she clothed her ideas. The themes dilated on touched exactly his favorite hobby, and it was evidently a gratification to him to find one fresh in feeling, endowed with genius and beauty, who could appreciate his feelings and sympathize with his artistic tastes. Reluctantly he parted with his companion, and on the morrow he seemed intuitively to know where he should find her, to renew the enjoyment of the previous day. Another day came, and another, until at length it became a matter of course that the two should meet. And still it was only poetry, or music, or painting, that occupied them. Why, then, did Ellen half surmise that the meeting was wrong? One day she did keep away, and thought she would try to do so always, but the hours hung heavily on her hands, and her resolution failed; so the walks continued. At length the period for her aunt's return arrived, and not only must she expect to be virtually imprisoned as before, but the dread of what her aunt would say when she heard (as surely from some kind, gossiping neighbor she would hear) of her daily interviews with a strange gentleman, broke upon her. Why had she not thought of this before? Why had she yielded to the temptation? All too late those questions now, and those only who know what it is to live amid insult and neglect can appreciate her feelings or estimate the temptations to which she was exposed.