g
out of the coffee-room window, loungers were seen who made her sensible
of the awkwardness of her position, and she looked about for yesterday's
guide as a friend, but he was not at hand, and her uneasy gaze brought
round her numbers, begging or offering guidance. She wished to retreat,
but would not, and walked briskly along the side of the valley opposite
to that she had yesterday visited, in search of the other four churches.
Two fragments were at the junction of the lakes, another was entirely
destroyed, but the last, called the Abbey, stood in ruins within the same
wall as the Round Tower, which rose straight, round, mysterious, defying
inquiry, as it caught the evening light on its summit, even as it had
done for so many centuries past.

Not that Cilla thought of the riddles of that tower, far less of the
early Christianity of the isle of saints, of which these ruins and their
wild legend were the only vestiges, nor of the mysticism that planted
clusters of churches in sevens as analogous to the seven stars of the
Apocalypse. Even the rugged glories of the landscape chiefly addressed
themselves to her as good to sketch, her highest flight in admiration of
the picturesque. In the state of mind ascribed to the ancients, she only
felt the weird unhomelikeness of the place, as though she were at the
ends of the earth, unable to return, and always depressed by solitude;
she could have wept. Was it for this that she had risked the love that
had been her own from childhood, and broken with the friend to whom her
father had commended her? Was it worth while to defy their censures for
this dreary spot, this weak-spirited, exacting, unrefined companion, and
the insult of Mr. Calthorp's pursuit?

Naturally shrewd, well knowing the world, and guarded by a real
attachment, Lucilla had never regarded the millionaire's attentions as
more than idle amusement in watching the frolics of a beauty, and had
suffered them as adding to her own diversion; but his secretly following
her, no doubt to derive mirth from her proceedings, revealed to her that
woman could not permit such terms without loss of dignity, and her cheek
burnt at the thought of the ludicrous light in which he might place her
present predicament before a conclave of gentlemen.

The thought was intolerable. To escape it by rapid motion, she turned
hastily to leave the enclosure. A figure was climbing over the steps in
the wall with outstretched hand, as if h