Looked ever aught so fair yet so forlorn? Methinks
there is a tear upon her cheek. Why comes it from
the Eden of her eye? I must speak to her;" and with
mixed fear and fervour he exclaimed: "May Heaven
keep you from grave cause of sorrow, lady! Forgive
me, oh, forgive me, lady, or vision, for, by these
dazzled eyes, and, as I fear, by your offended form,
I Scarcely can divine whether you are of earth or
air; pardon me if I have appeared here by night, as
unpremeditatedly as I came by day. Bid me begone,
-- and yet permit me to remain, for, by my life, and
the deep admiration with which you have inspired
me, I cannot leave you till I learn your grief, and
with it, peradventure, my own doom. Whom did
you speak of even now, fair form?"

"Who asks of me that question; who is it that
thus listens when I thought myself alone?" she
demanded haughtily, looking downwards from the
verandah. "Sir, just now I spoke, and said -- I
know not what. What you have overheard me say
I fear was foolish; do not, then, regard it. I know
you now. You are the stranger who, this morning,
drove those violent intruders from these grounds.
Ah, who would have thought you would return
by night, and thus, sir, play the eaves-dropper! Oh,
for shame! Nay, you are not the one I took you for.
Sir, it is mean to overlisten; mean, very mean; nay,
it is base, unmanly, to listen to a maid, when she
commits her vagaries to the moon."

"Scourge me, for I deserve it, with your tongue;"
rejoined the stranger -- "but, lady, you were not alone,
though I were absent; no; you cannot be alone.
Such excellence must draw hither elves and mid-

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v?