rocks and ice-fields.

Her brother said: 'There he is.' She saw the whitecrowned king of the
region, of whose near presence to her old home she had been accustomed
to think proudly, end she looked at him without springing to him,
and continued imaging her English home and her loveless uncle,
merely admiring the scene, as if the fire of her soul had been
extinguished.--'Marry, and be a blessing to a husband.' Chillon's words
whispered of the means of escape from the den of her uncle.

But who would marry me! she thought. An unreproved sensation of melting
pervaded her; she knew her capacity for gratitude, and conjuring it up
in her 'heart, there came with it the noble knightly gentleman who would
really stoop to take a plain girl by the hand, release her, and say: 'Be
mine!' His vizor was down, of course. She had no power of imagining the
lineaments of that prodigy. Or was he a dream? He came and went. Her
mother, not unkindly, sadly, had counted her poor girl's chances of
winning attention and a husband. Her father had doated on her face; but,
as she argued, her father had been attracted by her mother, a
beautiful woman, and this was a circumstance that reflected the greater
hopelessness on her prospects. She bore a likeness to her father, little
to her mother, though he fancied the reverse and gave her the mother's
lips and hair. Thinking of herself, however, was destructive to the form
of her mirror of knightliness: he wavered, he fled for good, as the rosy
vapour born of our sensibility must do when we relapse to coldness, and
the more completely when we try to command it. No, she thought, a plain
girl should think of work, to earn her independence.

'Women are not permitted to follow armies, Chillon?' she said.

He laughed out. 'What 's in your head?'

The laugh abashed her; she murmured of women being good nurses for
wounded soldiers, if they were good walkers to march with the army; and,
as evidently it sounded witless to him, she added, to seem reasonable:
'You have not told me the Christian names of those ladies.'

He made queer eyes over the puzzle to connect the foregoing and the
succeeding in her remarks, but answered straightforwardly: 'Livia is
one, and Henrietta!

Her ear seized on the stress of his voice. 'Henrietta!' She chose that
name for the name of the person disturbing her; it fused best, she
thought, with the new element she had been compelled to take into her
system, to absorb it if she co