instead of being a gracious high-bred young
gentleman, he had been the veriest tomboy.

"I fear, Sir Knight, you do not always rest easily in your apartment,"
Eileen's old father said to him one morning after he had been making
even more disturbance of this sort than usual. "We have rough ways here
in the North, and perhaps the arrangement of your sleeping quarters is
not exactly to your liking?"

But the knight, when he began to say this, interrupted him hastily, and
declared that he had never slept more comfortably in any room in his
life, or more peacefully, he said; he was seldom conscious of even so
much as awakening once. Of course, when he said this, Eileen and her
father could only open their eyes, and come to the conclusion that the
poor young knight was a somnambulist, and afflicted with the habit of
running and leaping in his sleep.

Again, too, out-of-doors, it was very odd how it affected him to hear
the birds sing. Whenever they began their songs, all sorts of nervous
twitchings would come over him, and he would lick his lips and make
convulsive movements with his hands; and his attention would become so
distracted that he would quite lose the thread of his discourse if he
were talking, or the thread of Eileen's, if she were talking to him. "It
is because I enjoy hearing them so much," he said once; and of course
when he said so Eileen could only believe him; yet she could not help
wishing he would show his pleasure in some other way than this curious
one of setting his teeth and rolling his eyes, and looking much more as
if he wanted to eat the birds than to listen to them.

Still, in spite of these and a good many other peculiarities, the young
knight was very charming, and Eileen was very fond of him. They used to
spend the happiest days together, wandering about the wild and beautiful
country, often sitting for hours on the rocky shores of the dark lough,
looking into the deep still water at their feet. It was a wild,
romantic, lonely place, shut out from the sunlight by great granite
cliffs that threw their dark weird shadows over it.

"Do you know there is a prophecy that our castle shall stand one day
here in the middle of the lough?" Eileen said, laughing, once. "I don't
know how it is to be done, but we are to be planted somehow in the
middle of the water. That is what the people say. I shouldn't like to
live here then. How gloomy it would be to have those great shadows
always over us!" and t