arwick encroached on all the good things power can
bestow and avarice seize; while the Duchess of Bedford and Friar Bungey
toiled hard at the waxen effigies of the great earl, who still held his
royal son-in-law in his court at Calais,--the stream of our narrative
winds from its noisier channels, and lingers, with a quiet wave, around
the temple of a virgin's heart. Wherefore is Sibyll sad? Some short
month since and we beheld her gay with hope and basking in the sunny
atmosphere of pleasure and of love. The mind of this girl was a singular
combination of tenderness and pride,--the first wholly natural, the last
the result of circumstance and position. She was keenly conscious of her
gentle birth and her earlier prospects in the court of Margaret; and
the poverty and distress and solitude in which she had grown up from the
child into the woman had only served to strengthen what, in her nature,
was already strong, and to heighten whatever was already proud. Ever in
her youngest dreams of the future ambition had visibly blent itself with
the vague ideas of love. The imagined wooer was less to be young and
fair than renowned and stately. She viewed him through the mists of the
future, as the protector of her persecuted father, as the rebuilder of a
fallen House, as the ennobler of a humbled name; and from the moment in
which her girl's heart beat at the voice of Hastings, the ideal of her
soul seemed found. And when, transplanted to the court, she learned to
judge of her native grace and loveliness by the common admiration they
excited, her hopes grew justified to her inexperienced reason. Often and
ever the words of Hastings, at the house of Lady Longueville, rang in
her ear, and thrilled through the solitude of night,--"Whoever is fair
and chaste, gentle and loving, is in the eyes of William de Hastings the
mate and equal of a king." In visits that she had found opportunity to
make to the Lady Longueville, these hopes were duly fed; for the old
Lancastrian detested the Lady Bonville, as Lord Warwick's sister,
and she would have reconciled her pride to view with complacency his
alliance with the alchemist's daughter, if it led to his estrangement
from the memory of his first love; and, therefore, when her quick eye
penetrated the secret of Sibyll's heart, and when she witnessed--for
Hastings often encountered (and seemed to seek the encounter) the young
maid at Lady Longueville's house--the unconcealed admiration which
just