in which the sinister figure which she and her father had encountered in
their ramble round the castle walls, bore a principal part.

When she awoke there were still in her ears the sounds which had mingled
in her dream. They were the notes of a deep, ringing, bass voice rising
from the glen beneath the castle walls--something between humming and
singing--listlessly unequal and intermittent, like the melody of a man
whiling away the hours over his work. While she was wondering at this
unwonted minstrelsy, there came a silence, and--could she believe her
ears?--it certainly was Una's clear low contralto--softly singing a bar
or two from the window. Then once more silence--and then again the
strange manly voice, faintly chaunting from the leafy abyss.

With a strange wild feeling of suspicion and terror, Alice glided to the
window. The moon who sees so many things, and keeps all secrets, with
her cold impenetrable smile, was high in the sky. But Alice saw the red
flicker of a candle from Una's window, and, she thought, the shadow of
her head against the deep side wall of its recess. Then this was gone,
and there were no more sights or sounds that night.

As they sate at breakfast, the small birds were singing merrily from
among the sun-tipped foliage.

"I love this music," said Alice, unusually pale and sad; "it comes with
the pleasant light of morning. I remember, Una, when you used to sing,
like those gay birds, in the fresh beams of the morning; that was in the
old time, when Una kept no secret from poor Alice."

"And Una knows what her sage Alice means; but there are other birds,
silent all day long, and, they say, the sweetest too, that love to sing