ohnstones, the opponents of Blacket House,
traced, rejected, and banished: and her heart finally torn and broken by
the antagonist powers of love and duty. She felt her own weakness, and
trembled at it, without coming to a resolution to make a disclosure;
while her overwhelming love carried her, on the moonlight nights, over
Kirconnel Lee, to meet her faithful Heir of Kirkpatrick in the romantic
burying-ground already described. This extraordinary place was that
fixed upon by the lovers for their night meetings; for in any other part
of the domains of Kirconnel they could not have escaped the eye of
Blacket House; who, though he had no suspicion of a rival, was so often
in search of the object of his engrossing passion, that she seldom went
out without being observed by the ever-waking and vigilant surveillance
of love.

Many times already had Helen waited till her unconscious parents retired
to the rest of the aged, and the moon threw her sheet of silver over
Kirconnel Lee, and, wrapped up in a night-cloak, slipped out at the
wicker-gate of the west enclosure, to seek, under the shades of the
oaks, Death's Mailing, the appointed trysting-place of the ardent
lovers. Again she was to see her beloved Heir of Kirkpatrick, and at
last she had resolved to break to him the painful position in which she
was placed by the still existing belief of her parents and Blacket
House, that she was to be his wedded wife. On this occasion, she sat
wistfully looking out at her chamber window. Her father and mother had
retired to their couch. Everything was quiet, the wind stilled, and the
mighty oaks whispered not the faintest sigh to disturb the sensitive ear
of night. The moon was already up, and she was on the eve of wrapping
her cloak round her, and creeping forth into the forest shade, when she
observed the long shadow of a man extending many yards upon the shining
grass of the green lee. The figure of the individual she could not see;
for a projection of the building, sufficient to conceal him, but not to
prevent his shadow from being revealed, interrupted her vision. She
hesitated and trembled. If the shadow had moved and disappeared, she
could have accounted for it, by supposing that some of the domestics had
not yet retired to bed; but why should a man stand alone and stationary
at that hour, in that place, in that position? Her fears ran all upon
Blacket House, who was never happy but when in her presence or near her
person; and