What was stranger, she sat down close beside the grave, which none but he
and the minister knew to be a grave; that little hillock, which he had
levelled a little, and had planted with various flowers and shrubs; which
the summer had fostered into richness, the poor young man below having
contributed what he could, and tried to render them as beautiful as he
might, in remembrance of his own beauty. Septimius wished to conceal the
fact of its being a grave: not that he was tormented with any sense that
he had done wrong in shooting the young man, which had been done in fair
battle; but still it was not the pleasantest of thoughts, that he had laid
a beautiful human creature, so fit for the enjoyment of life, there, when
his own dark brow, his own troubled breast, might better, he could not but
acknowledge, have been covered up there. [_Perhaps there might sometimes
be something fantastically gay in the language and behavior of the
girl._]

Well; but then, on this flower and shrub-disguised grave, sat this unknown
form of a girl, with a slender, pallid, melancholy grace about her, simply
dressed in a dark attire, which she drew loosely about her. At first
glimpse, Septimius fancied that it might be Rose; but it needed only a
glance to undeceive him; her figure was of another character from the
vigorous, though slight and elastic beauty of Rose; this was a drooping
grace, and when he came near enough to see her face, he saw that those
large, dark, melancholy eyes, with which she had looked at him, had never
met his gaze before.

"Good-morrow, fair maiden," said Septimius, with such courtesy as he knew
how to use (which, to say truth, was of a rustic order, his way of life
having brought him little into female society). "There is a nice air here
on the hill-top, this sultry morning below the hill!"