Lady Emily confessed she had seen the face of a man at the window, but her evidence went no farther. John Gudyill deponed nil novit in causa. He had left his gardening to get his morning dram just at the time when the apparition had taken place. Lady Emily's servant was waiting orders in the kitchen, and there was not another being within a quarter of a mile of the house.

Lord Evandale returned perplexed and dissatisfied in the highest degree, at beholding a plan which he thought necessary not less for the protection of Edith in contingent circumstances, than for the assurance of his own happiness, and which he had brought so very near perfection, thus broken off without any apparent or rational cause. His knowledge of Edith's character set her beyond the suspicion of covering any capricious change of determination by a pretended vision. But he would have set the apparition down to the influence of an overstrained imagination, agitated by the circumstances in which she had so suddenly been placed, had it not been for the coinciding testimony of Halliday, who had no reason for thinking of Morton more than any other person, and knew nothing of Miss Bellenden's vision, when he promulgated his own. On the other hand, it seemed in the highest degree improbable that Morton, so long and so vainly sought after, and who was, with such good reason, supposed to be lost when the Vryheid of Rotterdam went down with crew and passengers, should be alive and lurking in this country, where there was no longer any reason why he should not openly show himself, since the present government favoured his party in politics. When Lord Evandale reluctantly brought himself to communicate these doubts to the chaplain, in order to get his opinion, he could only obtain a long lecture on dæmonology, in which, after quoting Delrio, and Burthoog, and De L'Ancre, on the subject of apparitions, together with sundry civilians and common lawyers on the nature of testimony, the learned gentleman expressed his definite and determined opinion to be, either that there had been an 22* VOL. II.

actual apparition of the deceased Henry Morton's spirit, the possibility of which he was, as a divine and a philosopher, neither fully prepared to admit or to deny; or else, that the said Henry Morton, being still in rerum natura, had appeared in his proper person that morning; or, finally, that some strong deceptio visus, or striking similitude of person, had deceived the eyes of Miss Bellenden and of Thomas Halliday. Which of these was the most probable hypothesis, the Doctor declined to pronounce, but expressed himself ready to die in the opinion that one or other of them had occasioned that morning's disturbance.

Lord Evandale soon had additional cause for distressful anxiety. Miss Bellenden was declared to be dangerously ill.

"I will not leave this place," he exclaimed," till she is pronounced to be in safety. I neither can nor ought to do so; for whatever may have been the immediate occasion of her illness, I gave the first cause for it by my unhappy solicitation."

He established himself, therefore, as a guest in the family, which the presence of his sister as well as of Lady Margaret Bellenden, (who, in despite of her rheumatism, caused herself to be transported thither when she heard of her grand-daughter's illness,) rendered a step equally natural and delicate. And thus he anxiously awaited, until, without injury to her health, Edith could sustain a final explanation ere his departure on his expedition.

"She shall never," said the generous young man," look on her engagement with me as the means of fettering her to a union, the idea of which seems almost to unhinge her understanding."

CHAPTER XXVI.

Ah, happy hills! ah, pleasing shades!

Ah, fields beloved in vain!

Where once my careless childhood stray'd,

A stranger yet to pain.

Ode on a distant Prospect of Eton College.

It is not by corporal wants and infirmities only that men of the most distinguished talents are levelled, during their lifetime, with the common mass of mankind. There are periods of mental agitation when the firmest of mortals must be ranked with the weakest of his brethren; and when, in paying the general tax of humanity, his distresses are even aggravated by feeling that he transgresses, in the indulgence of his grief, the rules of religion and philosophy, by which he endeavours in general to regulate his passions and his actions. It was during such a paroxysm that the unfortunate Morton left Fairy-knowe. To know that his longloved and still-beloved Edith, whose image had filled his mind for so many years, was on the point of marriage to his early rival, who had laid claim to her heart by so many services, as hardly left her a title to refuse his addresses, bitter as the intelligence was, yet came not as an unexpected blow. During his residence abroad he had once written to Edith. It was to bid her farewell forever, and to conjure her to forget him. He had requested her not to answer bis letter, yet he half hoped, for many a day, that she might transgress his injunction. The letter never reached her to whom it was addressed, and Morton, ignorant of its miscarriage, could only conclude himself laid aside and forgotten, according to his own self-denying request. All that he had heard of their mutual relations since his return to Scotland, prepared him to expect that he could only look upon Miss Bellenden as the betrothed bride of Lord Evandale; and, even if freed from the

burden of obligation to the latter, it would still have been inconsistent with Morton's generosity of disposition to disturb their arrangements, by attempting the assertion of a claim, proscribed by absence, never sanctioned by the consent of friends, and barred by a thousand circumstances of difficulty. Why then did he seek the cottage which their broken fortunes had now rendered the retreat of Lady Margaret Bellenden and her grand-daughter? He yielded, we are under the necessity of acknowledging, to the impulse of an inconsistent wish, which many might have felt in his situation.

Accident apprized him, while travelling towards his native district, that the ladies, near whose mansion he must necessarily pass, were absent; and, learning that Cuddie and his wife acted as their principal domestics, he could not resist pausing at their cottage, to learn, if possible, the real progress which Lord Evandale had made in the affections of Miss Bellenden-alas! no longer his Edith. This rash experiment ended as we have related, and he parted from the house of Fairy-knowe, conscious that he was still beloved by Edith, yet compelled, by faith and honour, to relinquish her forever. With what feelings he must have listened to the dialogue between Lord Evandale and Edith, the greater part of which he involuntarily overheard, the reader must conceive, for we dare not attempt to describe them. A hundred times he was tempted to burst upon their interview, or to exclaim aloud"Edith, I yet live!"-and as often the recollection of her plighted troth, and of the debt of gratitude which he owed Lord Evandale, (to whose influence with Claverhouse he justly ascribed his escape from torture and from death) withheld him from a rashness which might indeed have involved all in further distress, but gave little prospect of forwarding his own happiness. He repressed forcibly these selfish emotions, though with an agony which thrilled his every nerve.

"No, Edith !" was his internal oath, "never will I add a thorn to thy pillow-That which Heaven has ordained let it be; and let me not add, by my selfish sorrows, one atom's weight to the burden thou hast to bear.

I was dead to thee when thy resolution was adopted; and never-never shalt thou know that Henry Morton still lives!"

As he formed this resolution, diffident of his own power to keep it, and seeking that firmness in flight which was every moment shaken by his continuing within hearing of Edith's voice, he hastily rushed from his apartment by the little closet and the sashed door which led to the garden.

But firmly as he thought his resolution was fixed, he could not leave the spot where the last tones of a voice so beloved still vibrated on his ear, without endeavouring to avail himself of the opportunity which the parlour window afforded to steal one last glance at the lovely speaker. It was in this attempt, made while Edith seemed to have her eyes unalterably bent upon the ground, that Morton's presence was detected by her raising them suddenly. So soon as her wild scream made this known to the unfortunate object of a passion so constant, and which seemed so ill-fated, he hurried from the place as if pursued by the furies. He passed Halliday in the garden without recognizing or even being sensible that he had seen him, threw himself on his horse, and, by a sort of instinct rather than recollection, took the first by-road in preference to the public route to Hamilton.

In all probability this prevented Lord Evandale from learning that he was actually in existence; for the news that the Highlanders had obtained a decisive victory at Killiecrankie, had occasioned an accurate look-out to be kept by order of the government, on all the passes, for fear of some commotion among the Lowland Jacobites., They did not omit to post sentinels on Bothwell Bridge, and as these men had not seen any traveller pass westward in that direction, and as, besides, their comrades stationed in the village of Bothwell were equally positive that none had gone eastward, the apparition, in the existence of which Edith and Halliday were equally positive, became yet more mysterious in the judgment of Lord Evandale, who was finally inclined to settle in the belief that the heated and disturbed imagina tion of Edith had summoned up the phantom she stated