eep wrong, coupled with the thirst of vengeance. No tenderer influence
had softened his almost rugged nature; and his breast continued arid as
the desert. Now the rock had been stricken, and the living waters gushed
forth abundantly. Not that in Norfolk, and even in the remote part of
the county where his life had been passed, female beauty was rare.
Nowhere, indeed, is the flower of loveliness more thickly sown than in
that favoured part of our isle. But all such young damsels as he had
beheld had failed to move him; and if any shaft had been aimed at his
breast it had fallen wide of the mark. Jocelyn Mounchensey was not one
of those highly susceptible natures--quick to receive an impression,
quicker to lose it. Neither would he have been readily caught by the
lures spread for youth by the designing of the sex. Imbued with
something of the antique spirit of chivalry, which yet, though but
slightly, influenced the age in which he lived, he was ready and able to
pay fervent homage to his mistress's sovereign beauty (supposing he had
one), and maintain its supremacy against all questioners, but utterly
incapable of worshipping at any meaner shrine. Heart-whole, therefore,
when he encountered the Puritan's daughter, he felt that in her he had
found an object he had long sought, to whom he could devote himself
heart and soul; a maiden whose beauty was without peer, and whose mental
qualities corresponded with her personal attractions.

Nor was it a delusion under which he laboured. Aveline Calveley was all
his imagination painted her. Purity of heart, gentleness of disposition,
intellectual endowments, were as clearly revealed by her speaking
countenance as the innermost depths of a fountain are by the pellucid
medium through which they are viewed. Hers was a virgin heart, which,
like his own, had received no previous impression. Love for her father
alone had swayed her; though all strong demonstrations of filial
affection had been checked by that father's habitually stern manner.
Brought up by a female relative in Cheshire, who had taken charge of her
on her mother's death, which had occurred during her infancy, she had
known little of her father till late years, when she had come to reside
with him, and, though devout by nature, she could ill reconcile herself
to the gloomy notions of religion he entertained, or to the ascetic mode
of life he practised. With no desire to share in the pomps and vanities
of life, she could n