Lancaster's Choice

"Ah!" said Leonora, checking an impatient sigh.

"And I've come to tell you," Mrs. West continued, "that if you'd like to go and sketch the Abbey ruins, you may go this morning, Leonora."

"If I'd like!" cried the girl. "Oh, Aunt West! it's just what I was wishing for. I shall be so happy!"

"Yes; you shall go, dear, and stay all day, if you like. I'll put you up a nice cold lunch in a little basket, and I'll hire the lodge-keeper's boy to show you the way. I'll give him a shilling to go, and he will stay all day to keep you from getting frightened."

"I shall not be frightened," said Leonora, radiant.

"I don't know; it's still and lonesome-like there, and the bats and screech-owls might startle you. And there's an old dismantled chapel, too—"

"Oh, how lovely! I shall sketch that, too!" Leonora exclaimed, clapping her bands like a gleeful child.

"And a little old grave-yard," pursued Mrs. West. "Some of the old Lancasters are buried there. You might be afraid of their ghosts."

"I am not afraid of the Lancasters, dead or living," the girl answered, saucily, her spirits rising at the prospect before her.

She set forth happily under the convoy of little Johnnie Dale, the lodge-keeper's lad, a loquacious urchin who plied her with small-talk while he walked by her side with the lunch-basket Mrs. West had prepared with as dainty care as if for Lady Lancaster herself.

She did not check the boy's happy volubility, although she did not heed it very much, either, as they hurried through the grand old park, where the brown-eyed deer browsed on the velvety green grass, and the great oak-trees cast shadows, perhaps a century old, across their path.

When they had shut the park gates behind them, and struck into the green country lanes, bordered with honeysuckle and lilac, Leonora drew breath with a sigh of delight.

"How sweet it all is! My father's country, too," she said. "Ah! he was right to love these grand old English homes, although he was but lowly born. What a grand old park, what sweet, green lanes, what a sweet and peaceful landscape! It is no wonder that the English love England!"

She remembered how her father, now dead and buried under the beautiful American skies, had loved England, and always intended to return to it some day with his daughter, that she might behold his native land.

She remembered how often he had quoted Mrs. Hemans' lines:

"The stately homes of England,
How beautiful they stand!
Amidst their tall ancestral trees
O'er all the pleasant land!
The deer across their greensward bound
Through shade and sunny gleam,
And the swan glides past them with the sound
Of some rejoicing stream."

"He loved the homes of England, although his fate was not cast with them," she said to herself. "Poor papa! I must try to love England for his sake; it was always dear to him, although he was fond of his kind adopted home, too!"

When they reached the ruins, she studied them carefully on every side to secure a picturesque view. She found that to get the best possible one she would have to sit down among the graves close to the little dismantled chapel.

"You bain't going to sit down amang them theer dead folk, missus?" inquired Johnnie, round-eyed, and on the alert for ghosts.

"Yes, I am. Are you afraid to stay, Johnnie?" she asked, laughing.

"Ya'as, I be," he replied, promptly.

"Very well; you may go off to a distance and play," said Leonora. "Don't let any one come this way to disturb me. And if you get hungry, you may have a sandwich out of my basket."

"I'm hungry now," he answered, greedily.

"Already, you little pig!" she cried. "Very well; take your sandwich now, then, and be off out of my way. I'm going to make a picture."

She sat down on the broken head-stone of an old grave, took out her materials, and while she trimmed her pencils, glanced down and read the name on the tomb beneath her.

It was Clive, Lord Lancaster.

Something like a shudder passed over her as this dead Lancaster, gone from the ways of men more than a century ago, recalled to her the living one.

"What do all the paltry aims and ambitions of our life matter, after all?" the girl asked herself, soberly. "The grave awaits us all at last!

"'The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Await alike the inevitable hour;
The path of glory leads but to the grave.'"

Sitting there among the lonely green graves and broken, discolored monuments, with the ivy creeping over their dim inscriptions, Leonora, a little lonely black figure, began her sketch.

She worked industriously and skillfully, and nothing disturbed her for several hours.

Johnnie had availed himself of the opportunity to make an excursion into the woods on his own account, and she was quite alone; but nothing alarmed her, and she worked on fearlessly amid the fragrant stillness of the lovely June day, whose calmness was broken by nothing louder than the hum of the bees among the flowers, or the joyous carol of the sky-lark as it soared from earth to heaven, losing itself, as it were, in the illimitable blue of the sky.

The midday sun climbed high and higher into the sky, and Leonora, pausing over her nearly completed sketch, pushed back her wide hat from her flushed face, and stopped to rest, glancing around at the quiet graves that encompassed her.

"What a still and peaceful company we are!" she said, aloud, quaintly, never thinking how strange it looked to see her sitting there—the only living thing among the silent tombs.

Then all at once, as if the tenants of the grave had come to life, Leonora heard a soft babel of voices and laughter.

With a start she turned her head.

A party of gay young ladies and gentlemen were strolling toward her across the level greensward. Foremost among them was Lord Lancaster, walking beside the earl's daughter.

It was too late for retreat.

Every eye turned on the graceful figure sitting there so quietly among the graves of the dead and gone Lancasters.

As they passed the low stone wall that divided them, Lancaster lifted his hat and bowed low and profoundly.

Then they were gone, but an eager hum of masculine voices was borne back to her ears on the light breeze:

"By Jove! what a beauty!"

"Heavens! was that a ghost?"

"What a lovely being! Who is she, Lancaster?" She heard his deep, musical voice answer carelessly:

"It is Miss West—a young lady who is staying in the neighborhood for the sketching, I believe."