e him not--some cloud envelopes him."--Ibid.

One day (nearly a year after their first introduction) as with a party
of friends Camilla and Charles Spencer were riding through those wild
and romantic scenes which lie between the sunny Winandermere and the
dark and sullen Wastwater, their conversation fell on topics more
personal than it had hitherto done, for as yet, if they felt love, they
had never spoken of it.

The narrowness of the path allowed only two to ride abreast, and the two
to whom I confine my description were the last of the little band.

"How I wish Arthur were here!" said Camilla; "I am sure you would like
him."

"Are you? He lives much in the world--the world of which I know nothing.
Are we then characters to suit each other?"

"He is the kindest--the best of human beings!" said Camilla, rather
evasively, but with more warmth than usually dwelt in her soft and low
voice.

"Is he so kind?" returned Spencer, musingly. "Well, it may be so. And
who would not be kind to you? Ah! it is a beautiful connexion that of
brother and sister--I never had a sister!"

"Have you then a brother?" asked Camilla, in some surprise, and turning
her ingenuous eyes full on her companion.

Spencer's colour rose--rose to his temples: his voice trembled as he
answered, "No;--no brother!" then, speaking in a rapid and hurried
tone, he continued, "My life has been a strange and lonely one. I am an
orphan. I have mixed with few of my own age: my boyhood and youth have
been spent in these scenes; my education such as Nature and books could
bestow, with scarcely any guide or tutor save my guardian--the dear old
man! Thus the world, the stir of cities, ambition, enterprise,--all
seem to me as things belonging to a distant land to which I shall never
wander. Yet I have had my dreams, Miss Beaufort; dreams of which these
solitudes still form a part--but solitudes not unshared. And lately I
have thought that those dreams might be prophetic. And you--do you love
the world?"

"I, like you, have scarcely tried it," said Camilla, with a sweet laugh.
"but I love the country better,--oh! far better than what little I have
seen of towns. But for you," she continued with a charming hesitation,
"a man is so different from us,--for you to shrink from the world--you,
so young and with talents too--nay, it is true!--it seems to me
strange."

"It may be so, but I cannot tell you what feelings of dread--what vague
forebodings of terror se