he
could not fall into slumber when she lay down upon her pillow, but tossed
from side to side with a burdened heart.

"She is so young and beautiful and proud," she thought. "It is because I
am so much older that I can see these things--that I see that this is
surely the one man who should be her husband. There may be many others,
but they are none of them her equals, and she would scorn and hate them
when she was once bound to them for life. This one is as beautiful as
she--and full of grace, and wit, and spirit. She could not look down
upon him, however wrath she was at any time. Ah me! She should not
spurn him, surely she should not!"

She was so restless and ill at ease that she could not lie upon her bed,
but rose therefrom, as she often did in her wakeful hours, and went to
her lattice, gently opening it to look out upon the night, and calm
herself by sitting with her face uplifted to the stars, which from her
childhood she had fancied looked down upon her kindly and as if they
would give her comfort.

To-night there were no stars. There should have been a moon
three-quarters full, but, in the evening, clouds had drifted across the
sky and closed over all heavily, so that no moonlight was to be seen,
save when a rare sudden gust made a ragged rent, for a moment, in the
blackness.

She did not sit this time, but knelt, clad in her night-rail as she was.
All was sunk into the profoundest silence of the night. By this time the
entire household had been long enough abed to be plunged in sleep. She
alone was waking, and being of that simple mind which, like a child's,
must ever bear its trouble to a protecting strength, she looked up at the
darkness of the cloudy sky and prayed for the better fortune of the man
who had indeed not remembered her existence after the moment he had made
her his obeisance. She was too plain and sober a creature to be
remembered.

"Perchance," she murmured, "he is at this moment also looking at the
clouds from his window, because he cannot sleep for thinking that in two
days he will be beneath her father's roof and will see her loveliness,
and he must needs be contriving within his mind what he will say, if she
do but look as if she might regard him with favour, which I pray she
will."

From the path below, that moment there rose a slight sound, so slight a
one that for a moment she thought she must have been deceived in
believing it had fallen upon her ear. All was still