himself into a chair, or rest his elbow upon a table, or lean against the angle of a doorway, or stretch himself full-length upon the grass to fall asleep with his head upon his folded arms, without making himself into a kind of picture. He looked like a picture just now as he lounged in the castle window, with his face turned towards Mr. Raymond. The lady, who was called Lady Gwendoline, put up her eye-glass to look at another picture; and in that attitude Isabel had time to contemplate her, and saw that she too was graceful, and that in every fold of her simple dress--it was only muslin, but quite a different fabric from Isabel's muslin--there was an indescribable harmony which stamped her as the creature of that splendid sphere which the girl only knew in her books. She looked longer and more earnestly at Lady Gwendoline than at Roland Lansdell, for in this elegant being she saw the image of herself, as she had fancied herself so often--the image of a heartless aristocratic divinity, for whose sake people cut their throats, and broke blood-vessels, and drowned themselves. George came in while his wife was looking at Lady Gwendoline, and Mr. Raymond suddenly remembered the young couple whom he had taken upon himself to chaperone. "I must introduce you to some new friends of mine, Roland," he said; "and when you are ill you must send for Mr. Gilbert of Graybridge, who, I am given to understand, is a very clever surgeon, and whom I _know_ to have the best moral region I ever had under my hand. Gilbert, my dear boy, this is Roland Lansdell of Mordred Priory; Lady Gwendoline, Mrs. Gilbert--Mr. Lansdell. But you know something about my friend Roland, I think, don't you, Isabel?" Mrs. Gilbert bowed and smiled and blushed in a pleasant bewilderment. To be introduced, to two Beings in this off-hand manner was almost too much for Mr. Sleaford's daughter. A faint perfume of jasmine and orange-blossom floated towards her from Lady Gwendoline's handkerchief, and she seemed to see the fair-haired lady who smiled at her, and the dark-haired gentleman who had risen at her approach, through an odorous mist that confused her senses. "I think you know something of my friend Roland," Mr. Raymond repeated; "eh, my dear?" "Oh, n--no indeed," Isabel stammered; "I never saw--" "You never saw _him_ before to-day," answered Mr. Raymond, laying his hand on the young man's shoulder with a kind of protecting tenderness in the gesture. "But you've read his verses; those pretty drawing-room Byronics, that refined and anglicised Alfred-de-Musset-ism, that you told me you are so fond of:--don't you remember asking me who wrote the verses, Mrs. Gilbert? I told you the Alien was a country squire; and here he is--a Midlandshire squire of high degree, as the old ballad has it."