f the iron box. And then there was so
little in her London life to gratify her! It is pleasant to win in a
fight;--but to be always fighting is not pleasant. Except in those
moments, few and far between, in which she was alone with her cousin
Frank,--and perhaps in those other moments in which she wore her
diamonds,--she had but little in London that she enjoyed. She still
thought that a time would come when it would be otherwise. Under
these influences she had actually made herself believe that she was
sighing for the country, and for solitude; for the wide expanse of
her own bright waves,--as she had called them,--and for the rocks of
dear Portray. She had told Miss Macnulty and Augusta Fawn that she
thirsted for the breezes of Ayrshire, so that she might return to her
books and her thoughts. Amidst the whirl of London it was impossible
either to read or to think. And she believed it too,--herself. She
so believed it, that on the first morning of her arrival she took a
little volume in her pocket, containing Shelley's "Queen Mab," and
essayed to go down upon the rocks. She had actually breakfasted at
nine, and was out on the sloping grounds below the castle before ten,
having made some boast to Miss Macnulty about the morning air.

She scrambled down,--not very far down, but a little way beneath the
garden gate, to a spot on which a knob of rock cropped out from the
scanty herbage of the incipient cliff. Fifty yards lower the real
rocks began; and, though the real rocks were not very rocky, not
precipitous or even bold, and were partially covered with salt-fed
mosses down almost to the sea, nevertheless they justified her in
talking about her rock-bound shore. The shore was hers,--for her
life, and it was rock-bound. This knob she had espied from her
windows;--and, indeed, had been thinking of it for the last week,
as a place appropriate to solitude and Shelley. She had stood on
it before, and had stretched her arms with enthusiasm towards the
just-visible mountains of Arran. On that occasion the weather,
perhaps, had been cool; but now a blazing sun was overhead, and when
she had been seated half a minute, and "Queen Mab" had been withdrawn
from her pocket, she found that it would not do. It would not do,
even with the canopy she could make for herself with her parasol. So
she stood up and looked about herself for shade;--for shade in some
spot in which she could still look out upon "her dear wide ocean,
with its gl