him to keep his bedchamber.

To look back on the events of the preceding day, was, to Isabella, a
very unpleasing retrospect. She owed her life, and that of her father,
to the very person by whom, of all others, she wished least to be
obliged, because she could hardly even express common gratitude towards
him without encouraging hopes which might be injurious to them both.
"Why should it be my fate to receive such benefits, and conferred at
so much personal risk, from one whose romantic passion I have so
unceasingly laboured to discourage? Why should chance have given him
this advantage over me? and why, oh why, should a half-subdued feeling
in my own bosom, in spite of my sober reason, almost rejoice that he has
attained it?"

While Miss Wardour thus taxed herself with wayward caprice, she, beheld
advancing down the avenue, not her younger and more dreaded preserver,
but the old beggar who had made such a capital figure in the melodrama
of the preceding evening.

She rang the bell for her maid-servant. "Bring the old man up stairs."

The servant returned in a minute or two--"He will come up at no rate,
madam;--he says his clouted shoes never were on a carpet in his life, and
that, please God, they never shall.--Must I take him into the servants'
hall?"

"No; stay, I want to speak with him--Where is he?" for she had lost sight
of him as he approached the house.

"Sitting in the sun on the stone-bench in the court, beside the window
of the flagged parlour."

[Illustration: Eddie Ochiltree Visits Miss Wardour]

"Bid him stay there--I'll come down to the parlour, and speak with him at
the window."

She came down accordingly, and found the mendicant half-seated,
half-reclining, upon the bench beside the window. Edie Ochiltree, old
man and beggar as he was, had apparently some internal consciousness
of the favourable, impressions connected with his tall form, commanding
features, and long white beard and hair. It used to be remarked of him,
that he was seldom seen but in a posture which showed these personal
attributes to advantage. At present, as he lay half-reclined, with his
wrinkled yet ruddy cheek, and keen grey eye turned up towards the sky,
his staff and bag laid beside him, and a cast of homely wisdom and
sarcastic irony in the expression of his countenance, while he gazed for
a moment around the court-yard, and then resumed his former look upward,
he might have been taken by an artist as the model of an