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