Bolding's blue eyes and silk shoes. Now, combining together all these
doubts and apprehensions, wonder not, O reader, why I stole so stealthily
through the ruined court-yard, crept round to the other side of the
tower, gazed wistfully on the sun setting slant, on the high casements of
the hall (too high, alas! to look within), and shrank yet to enter,--
doing battle, as it were, with my heart.

Steps--one's sense of hearing grows so quick in the Bushland!--steps,
though as light as ever brushed the dew from the harebell! I crept under
the shadow of the huge buttress mantled with ivy. A form comes from the
little door at an angle in the ruins,--a woman's form. Is it my mother?
It is too tall, and the step is more bounding. It winds round the
building, it turns to look back, and a sweet voice--a voice strange, yet
familiar--calls, tender but chiding, to a truant that lags behind. Poor
Juba! he is trailing his long ears on the ground; he is evidently much
disturbed in his mind: now he stands still, his nose in the air. Poor
Juba! I left thee so slim and so nimble,--

"Thy form, that was fashioned as light as a fay's,
Has assumed a proportion more round;"

years have sobered thee strangely, and made thee obese and Primmins-like.
They have taken too good care of thy creature-comforts, O sensual
Mauritanian! Still, in that mystic intelligence we call instinct thou
art chasing something that years have not swept from thy memory. Thou
art deaf to thy lady's voice, however tender and chiding. That's right!
Come near,--nearer,--my cousin Blanche; let me have a fair look at thee.
Plague take the dog! he flies off from her; he has found the scent; he is
making up to the buttress! Now--pounce--he is caught, whining ungallant
discontent! Shall I not yet see the face? It is buried in Juba's black