Mrs. Hazleton marked her enjoyment with great satisfaction; for either by study or intuition she had a deep knowledge of the springs and sources of human emotions, and she knew well that one enthusiasm always disposes to another. Nay, more, she knew that whatever is associated in the mind with pleasant scenes is usually pleasing, and she had plotted the meeting between Emily and him she intended to be her lover with considerable pains to produce that effect. Nature seemed to have been a sharer in her schemes. The day could not have been better chosen. There was the light fresh air, the few floating clouds, the merry dancing gleams upon hill and dale, a light, momentary shower of large, jewel-like drops, the fragment of a broken rainbow painting the distant verge of heaven. At length the summit of the hills was reached; and Mrs. Hazleton told her sweet companion to look out there, ordering the carriage at the same time to stop. It was indeed a scene well worthy of the gaze. Far spreading out beneath the eye lay a wide basin in the hills, walled in, as it were, by those tall summits, here and there broken by a crag. The ground sloped gently down from the spot at which the carriage paused, so that the whole expanse was open to the eye, and over the short brown herbage, through which a purple gleam from the yet unblossomed heath shone out, the lights and shades seemed sporting in mad glee. All was indeed solitary, uncultivated, and even barren, except where, in the very centre of the wide hollow, appeared a number of trees, not grouped together in a wood, but scattered over a considerable space of ground, as if the remnants of some old deer-park, and over their tall tops rose up the ruined keep of some ancient stronghold of races passed away, with here and there another tower or pinnacle appearing, and long lines of grassy mounds, greener than the rest of the landscape, glancing between the stems of the older trees, or bearing up in picturesque confusion their own growth of wild, fantastic, seedling ashes. By the name of the spot, Ellendon, which means strong-hill, I believe it is more than probable that the Anglo-Saxons had here some forts before the conquest; but the ruin which now presented itself to the eyes of Emily and Mrs. Hazleton was evidently of a later date and of Norman construction. Here, probably, some proud baron of the times of Henry, Stephen, or Matilda, had built his nest on high, perchance to overawe the Saxon churls around him, perhaps to set at defiance the royal power itself. Here the merry chase had swept the hills; here revelry and pageantry had checkered a life of fierce strife and haughty oppression. Such scenes, at least such thoughts, presented themselves to the imaginative mind of Emily, like the dreamy gleams that skimmed in gold and purple before her eyes; but the effect of any strong feeling, whether of enjoyment or of grief, was always to make her silent; and she gazed without uttering a word.