tulations, and she wisely checked the
course of her thoughts, while, as the hour was not yet come, in which
she had been accustomed to hear the music, she closed the casement,
and endeavoured to await it in patience. The door of the stair-case she
tried to secure, as usual, with some of the furniture of the room; but
this expedient her fears now represented to her to be very inadequate to
the power and perseverance of Verezzi; and she often looked at a large
and heavy chest, that stood in the chamber, with wishes that she and
Annette had strength enough to move it. While she blamed the long
stay of this girl, who was still with Ludovico and some other of the
servants, she trimmed her wood fire, to make the room appear less
desolate, and sat down beside it with a book, which her eyes perused,
while her thoughts wandered to Valancourt, and her own misfortunes. As
she sat thus, she thought, in a pause of the wind, she distinguished
music, and went to the casement to listen, but the loud swell of the
gust overcame every other sound. When the wind sunk again, she heard
distinctly, in the deep pause that succeeded, the sweet strings of a
lute; but again the rising tempest bore away the notes, and again was
succeeded by a solemn pause. Emily, trembling with hope and fear, opened
her casement to listen, and to try whether her own voice could be
heard by the musician; for to endure any longer this state of torturing
suspense concerning Valancourt, seemed to be utterly impossible. There
was a kind of breathless stillness in the chambers, that permitted her
to distinguish from below the tender notes of the very lute she had
formerly heard, and with it, a plaintive voice, made sweeter by the low
rustling sound, that now began to creep along the wood-tops, till it
was lost in the rising wind. Their tall heads then began to wave, while,
through a forest of pine, on the left, the wind, groaning heavily,
rolled onward over the woods below, bending them almost to their roots;
and, as the long-resounding gale swept away, other woods, on the
right, seemed to answer the 'loud lament;' then, others, further still,
softened it into a murmur, that died into silence. Emily listened,
with mingled awe and expectation, hope and fear; and again the melting
sweetness of the lute was heard, and the same solemn-breathing voice.
Convinced that these came from an apartment underneath, she leaned far
out of her window, that she might discover whether any