"Pretty well done, Rowan!" exclaimed one of the others as he himself reached the ground. "Broke any thing?" "No, nothing--except," and at that moment his eye caught the forms and faces of Miss Clara Vanderlyn and her mother, who were standing at the edge of the piazza, waiting while Frank descended and made some arrangement for the disposition of their baggage. "H. T.," of the coach-load, was standing within a few feet of them, his little satchel still strapped over his shoulder and his eyes scarcely wandering at all from the woman whom they had scanned so long and well during the journey by rail. But he had glanced around, with the others, at the noise made by the singular descent; and his eye met that of the man who had been called Rowan, as the latter made the discovery of mother and daughter. It was but a lightning flash that Rowan gave or the stranger detected, but few glances of any human eye have ever expressed more within the same period. He evidently saw the young girl for the first time, at that moment; and quite as evidently he drank in at that one glimpse the full charm of her beauty and goodness. That was not all: in the one glance, too, he apparently measured her wealth and social position--saw and reckoned up the proud woman standing beside her--then took, it is probable, an introspective view of himself and his own surroundings, and found time to realize the utter hopelessness of that impulse which for the tithe of a moment he must have felt stirring within him. Perhaps half-a-dozen seconds had elapsed before he concluded the answer he had begun. "No, nothing--except--my heart!" He had begun to speak in a light, gay, off-hand manner: he concluded in a low, sad voice, full alike of music and melancholy.