 father and his, and perhaps could in
her gentleness of mind hardly have comprehended the angry and bitter passions
which they had engendered. But she knew that he was come of noble stem; was
poor, though descended from the noble and the wealthy; and she felt that she
could sympathise with the feelings of a proud mind, which urged him to recoil
from the proffered gratitude of the new proprietors of his father's house and
domains. Would he have equally shunned their acknowledgments and avoided their
intimacy, had her father's request been urged more mildly, less abruptly, and
softened with the grace which women so well know how to throw into their manner,
when they mean to mediate betwixt the headlong passions of the ruder sex? This
was a perilous question to ask her own mind - perilous both in the idea and in
its consequences.
    Lucy Ashton, in short, was involved in those mazes of the imagination which
are most dangerous to the young and the sensitive. Time, it is true, absence,
change of scene and new faces, might probably have destroyed the illusion in her
instance as it has done in many others; but her residence remained solitary, and
her mind without those means of dissipating her pleasing visions. This solitude
was chiefly owing to the absence of Lady Ashton, who was at this time in
Edinburgh, watching the progress of some state intrigue; the Lord Keeper only
received society out of policy or ostentation, and was by nature rather reserved
and unsociable; and thus no cavalier appeared to rival or to obscure the ideal
picture of chivalrous excellence which Lucy had pictured to herself in the
Master of Ravenswood.
    While Lucy indulged in these dreams, she made frequent visits to old blind
Alice, hoping it would be easy to lead her to talk on the subject, which at
present she had so imprudently admitted to occupy so large a portion of her
thoughts. But Alice did not in this particular gratify her wishes and
expectations. She spoke readily, and with pathetic feeling, concerning the
family in general, but seemed to observe an especial and cautious silence on the
subject of the present representative. The little she said of him was not
altogether so favourable as Lucy had anticipated. She hinted that he was of a
stern and unforgiving character, more ready to resent than to pardon injuries;
and Lucy combined with great alarm the hints which she now dropped of these
dangerous qualities, with Alice's advice to her father, so emphatically given,
»to beware of Ravenswood.«
    But that very Ravenswood, of whom such unjust suspicions had been
entertained, had, almost immediately
