and borrowing a more touching beauty from the soft light that dwelt upon it, and her full yet still scarcely developed bosom heaving at thoughts which she did not analyse, but was content to feel at once vague and delicious; he gazed, and his lips trembled—he longed to speak—he longed to say but those words which convey what volumes have endeavoured to express, and have only weakened by detail—"I love." How he resisted the yearnings of his heart, we know not—but he did resist—and Lucy, after a confused and embarrassed pause, took up one of the poems on the table, and asked him some questions about a particular passage in an old ballad which he had once pointed to her notice. The passage related to a border chief, one of the Armstrongs of old, who having been seized by the English and condemned to death, vented his last feelings in a passionate address to his own home—his rude tower—and his newly-wedded bride. "Do you believe," said Lucy, as their conversation began to flow, "that one so lawless and eager for bloodshed and strife,
