he made a bold conjecture to be that
of the lord in question; and making a calculation of the influences of
time and war, which he weighed with a comparison of the lady's age,
he gave a description of her lord sufficiently like the picture in its
groundwork to be a true resemblance, and sufficiently differing from
it in circumstances to be more an original than a copy. The lady was
completely deceived, and entreated them to partake her hospitality for
the night; but this they deemed it prudent to decline, and with many
humble thanks for her kindness, and representations of the necessity of
not delaying their homeward course, they proceeded on their way.

As they passed over the drawbridge, they met Sir Ralph Montfaucon and
his squire, who were wandering in quest of Marian, and were entering
to claim that hospitality which the pilgrims had declined. Their
countenances struck Sir Ralph with a kind of imperfect recognition,
which would never have been matured, but that the eyes of Marian, as
she passed him, encountered his, and the images of those stars of beauty
continued involuntarily twinkling in his sensorium to the exclusion of
all other ideas, till memory, love, and hope concurred with imagination
to furnish a probable reason for their haunting him so pertinaciously.
Those eyes, he thought, were certainly the eyes of Matilda Fitzwater;
and if the eyes were hers, it was extremely probable, if not logically
consecutive, that the rest of the body they belonged to was hers also.
Now, if it were really Matilda Fitzwater, who were her two companions?
The baron? Aye, and the elder pilgrim was something like him. And the
earl of Huntingdon? Very probably. The earl and the baron might be good
friends again, now that they were both in disgrace together. While he
was revolving these cogitations, he was introduced to the lady, and
after claiming and receiving the promise of hospitality, he inquired
what she knew of the pilgrims who had just departed? The lady told him
they were newly returned from Palestine, having been long in the Holy
Land. The knight expressed some scepticism on this point. The lady
replied, that they had given her so minute a detail of her lord's
proceedings, and so accurate a description of his person, that she could
not be deceived in them. This staggered the knight's confidence in
his own penetration; and if it had not been a heresy in knighthood to
suppose for a moment that there could be in rerum natura