How strange, how mysterious, the mechanism of the human heart!  The feelings glide insensibly into each other, changing their hue and character imperceptibly, as the colours on the evening cloud.  Protection awakens kindness, kindness pity, and pity love.  Love, the more dangerous, too, the process being unperceived, insidiously disguised under other names, and under the finest sympathies and affections of our nature.

With a step light and noiseless as that of her favourite spaniel who crept behind her, did Constance make an early visit to ascertain the safety of her prisoner.  His retreat was unmolested.  The pursuit was for the present evaded, and his enemies thrown out in their track.  It was needful, however, that he should remain for a few days in his present concealment, prior to the attempt by which he purposed to regain his native country.

Constance loved the moonlight.  The broad glare of day is so garish and extravagant.  Besides, there is a restlessness and a buz no human being, at least no sensible human being, can endure.  Everything is on the stir.  Every creature, however paltry and insignificant, whether moth, mote, or atom, seems busy.  Whereas, one serene soft gaze of the moon appears to allay nature’s universal disquiet.  The calm and mellow placidity of her look, so heavenly and undisturbed, lulls the soul, and subdues its operations to her influence.

Constance, we may suppose, accidentally wandered by the end of the building, where, in the huge buttress of chimneys, a narrow crevice admitted light into the chamber occupied by the fugitive.  At times, perhaps unconsciously, her eye wandered from the moon to this dreary abode; where it lingered longest is more than we dare tell.  She drew nigh to the dark margin of the pond.  The white swans were sleeping in the sedge.  At her approach they fluttered clumsily to their element; there, the symbols of elegance and grace, like wreaths of sea-foam on its surface, they glided on, apparently without an impulse or an effort.  She was gazing on them when a rustle amongst the willows on her left arrested her attention.  Soon the mysterious and almost omnipresent form of Tyrone stood before her.

“I must away, maiden—­Constance!” His voice was mournful as the last faint sound of the evening bell upon the waters.

“Why art thou here?” She said this in a tone of mingled anxiety and surprise.

“Here?  Too long have I lingered in these woods and around thy dwelling, Constance.  But I must begone—­for ever!”

“For ever?” cried the perplexed girl, forgetful of all but the dread thought of that for ever!

“Ay, for ever?  Why should I stay?”

This question, alas! she could not answer, but stood gazing on the dark water, and on the silver waves which the bright swans had rippled over the pool.  Though she saw them not, yet the scene mingled itself insensibly with the feelings then swelling in her bosom; and these recurrent circumstances, in subsequent periods of her existence, never failed to bring the same dark tide of thought over the soul with vivid and agonising distinctness.