IT was not without a very strange mixture of feelings that Charlotte, when left to her solitude, looked round the little airy bedchamber, where, in former times, light slumbers and pleasant dreams had so often soothed her maiden pillow. In all respects, the room was exactly as she had left it ten years before. The bed stood on the same spot; and its white dimity curtains had preserved all the neatness of their appearance, while a cheerful fire-light shewed the walls, still covered with the same little prints and drawings with which she and Isabel had taken so much pleasure in adorning them. A piece of needlework, on which the fingers of them both had been exercised when they were girls at school together in Edinburgh, hung in the centre, over the chimney-piece, and displayed all its fine flowers, and leaves, and hieroglyphical emblems, in their original shapes, though the worsted had become a little tarnished and dimmed in the colouring. The same Bible and Psalm-book lay on the dressing-table, and there was not one tall, long-backed cherry-wood chair in the room but was an old acquaintance. She seated herself, half undressed, in the familiar corner by the fire-place, and gazed round and round her, till her mind was quite bewildered with the long trains of minute images and remembrances that arose one out of another, and flitted like so many dreams over her mind. There is a charm in such reveries that nothing can entirely destroy; and so, though her musings were melancholy enough in the main, there was a sort of romantic influence mingled in their airy texture, which soothed, in some measure, a heart naturally of great sensibility; and perhaps it might almost have been said, that excited and exerted memory made up to itself, in the consciousness of its energies, for the substantial gloominess of too many of the objects which those very energies had recalled from long oblivion.

She rose from her seat in a mood of pensiveness rather than of sorrow, and walked towards the window, which, almost without knowing what she was about, she threw open, and looked out upon one of the finest moonlight nights that ever adorned the most delightful season of the Scottish year.