“A moment the sun stood on the mountains;
The mists of the night he roll’d from their sides,
Blaz’d, and ascended the heavens.”
“Yes—yes—It is the form of Fingall!—Now
The blast rolls it together—gradual
Vanish his stately limbs, and mingle with
The mountain mist.”
In the morning Julia stole from the side of Frances, at a very early
hour, and seated herself near a window. For a time all was still. At
length she heard a step in the hall, then a gentle tap at a, not very
distant, room door; then, the well known voice of Fitz-Ullin answering
from within with that urbanity of tone for which he was so remarkable,
the servant who had told him the hour. This was followed by various
slight noises; then the wheels of a carriage on the gravel beneath her
window; then Fitz-Ullin’s step, quitting his apartment, and crossing the
hall; then the clap of the carriage-door, followed immediately by the
sound of the wheels again, but in quicker motion than before. She now saw
Fitz-Ullin’s travelling carriage drive away. As it turned, in doing so,
she caught, through a screen of jessamine, which, overgrowing her window,
concealed her, one momentary view of the countenance of our hero. It was
very pale, and he was looking towards the very window so screened, with a
settled melancholy of expression, which seemed to convey to Julia’s heart
a presentiment that they should never meet again.
She had maintained all this time an unnatural degree of composure; a
passion of tears now came to her relief. Till being reminded by a slight
movement of Frances, that, should her sister awake and speak to her, all
reserve must, she felt, henceforward be at an end, and a contemptible
weakness, for which she heartily despised herself, be thus exposed, she
determined to steal out softly to the breakfast room, where, throwing
herself on a sofa, she lay in all the listlessness of despondency for an
hour and half, at the end of which time she was aroused by the sound of
a carriage driving up to the door. Her heart palpitated violently. “What
can have brought him back?” she thought. She heard a bustle in the hall,
and one of the men servants’ voices calling to Alice, and enquiring if
Lady Julia was up yet. Shortly after, steps approached the door of the
breakfast room, it opened.