It was on a beautiful evening in June, when the thirteenth century was but a few years old, and when John wore the crown of England, that a girl of some twenty summers was seated in a vaulted room of a ruinous old Saxon castle, surrounded by her bower-maidens, chattering and laughing, and busily employed on some embroidery work. The castle stood on a slight eminence, some three or four miles from the sea-coast of Yorkshire, and commanding a glorious view of the uplands of Cleveland, the wide expanse of ocean, the only recently completed towers of St. Hilda's Abbey, as they stood proudly on the beetling cliff, and the clustering of fishermen's huts on the margin of the bay below, then called the village of Presteby, formerly Streoneshalh, and now Whitby. It had been built by the half-mythical Saxon noble, Wada, as a defence against the marauding Picts, who came over the border, and more particularly against the Danish Vikings, who were wont to land at Flamborough, and harry the land. In the year 867, they had destroyed the Lady Hilda's monastery, and it lay in ruins until after the Conquest, when it was re-built and re-endowed by William de Percy, ancestor of the potent Earls of Northumberland, and about half a century before the period of our narrative, it had been again pillaged and the country laid waste by a Norwegian fleet. But, amid all these storms, the old castle built by Wada held its own, although it now showed in its features the ravages of time and the marks of the batterings it had undergone from the hands of a succession of foes, in the shape of fallen towers, crumbling walls, and decayed battlements. After the Conquest, the castle and barony were granted by the King to Nigel Fossard, a soldier who had fought for him at Hastings, and from whose family it passed, after two or three generations, to Robert de Turnham, by marriage with Johanna, heiress of the Fossards. They were now dead, and slept side by side within the sacred precincts of St. Hilda, having left an only child--Isabel--as heiress, and now mistress of the ruined old fortress, and the domain of pasture and moorland lying round it; the same fair girl whom we find seated at her embroidery frame. The apartment in which the youthful group were assembled was the Lady Isabel's bower, very different, however, from a modern boudoir, being of the usual Saxon type. The walls and vaulted roof were of roughly-hewn stone, with a low, stunted column in the centre, and rounded arches, slightly decorated with a zigzag ornamentation, and on one side was an unglazed opening to admit the light, more like a loophole than a window. On the walls, suspended from tenter-hooks, were arras, picturing the miracles of St. Hilda, which served to give some semblance of comfort and cheerfulness to the room; and the other furniture consisted of a table, or board resting on two trestles, and half a dozen cross-legged stools.