with a thousand apprehensions;
and the more restlessly her lover occupies her mind, the more deeply he
enthrals it.

Mingling with her pure and tender attachment to Aram, a high and
unswerving veneration, she saw in his fitfulness, and occasional
abstraction and contradiction of manner, a confirmation of the modest
sentiment that most weighed upon her fears; and imagined that at those
times he thought her, as she deemed herself, unworthy of his love.
And this was the only struggle which she conceived to pass between
the affection he evidently bore her, and the feelings which had as yet
restrained him from its open avowal.

One evening, Lester and the two sisters were walking with the Student
along the valley that led to the house of the latter, when they saw an
old woman engaged in collecting firewood among the bushes, and a little
girl holding out her apron to receive the sticks with which the crone's
skinny arms unsparingly filled it. The child trembled, and seemed
half-crying; while the old woman, in a harsh, grating croak, was
muttering forth mingled objurgation and complaint.

There was something in the appearance of the latter at once impressive
and displeasing; a dark, withered, furrowed skin was drawn like
parchment over harsh and aquiline features; the eyes, through the rheum
of age, glittered forth black and malignant; and even her stooping
posture did not conceal a height greatly above the common stature,
though gaunt and shrivelled with years and poverty. It was a form and
face that might have recalled at once the celebrated description of
Otway, on a part of which we have already unconsciously encroached, and
the remaining part of which we shall wholly borrow.

"--On her crooked shoulders had she wrapped The tattered remnants of an
old stript hanging, That served to keep her carcase from the cold, So
there was nothing of a piece about her. Her lower weeds were all o'er
coarsely patched With different coloured rags, black, red, white,
yellow, And seemed to speak variety of wretchedness."

"See," said Lester, "one of the eyesores of our village, (I might say)
the only discontented person."

"What! Dame Darkmans!" said Ellinor, quickly. "Ah! let us turn back. I
hate to encounter that old woman; there is something so evil and savage
in her manner of talk--and look, how she rates that poor girl, whom she
has dragged or decoyed to assist her!"

Aram looked curiously on the old hag. "Poverty," said he, "ma