in vain, at the empty house, of the shadows who may have kept it.  It was not pleasant to see so goodly a mansion falling to ruin for want of fit occupancy, truly; and just as the walls had grown gray with rain and time, the chimneys choked and the casements shrunken, a merry company of friends and families, from another portion of the country, consolidated themselves into a society for the pursuit of happiness, rented the old place, put in carpenters and masons and glaziers, and, when the last tenants vacated the premises, took possession in state themselves.  Care and responsibility were not theirs; the matron and her servants alone received such guests; the long summer-days were to come and go with them as joyously as with Bacchus and his crew.

Behold the party domesticated a fortnight at the Bawn, as it was afterward dubbed.  Mr. Laudersdale had returned to New York that morning, and his wife had not been met since.  Now, at about five o’clock, her white robe floated past the door, and she was seen moving up and down the long piazza and humming a faint little tune to herself.  Just then a flock of young women, married and single, fluttered through door and windows to join her; and just then Mrs. Laudersdale stepped down from the end of the piazza and floated up the garden-path and into the woods that skirted the lake-shore and stretched far back and away.  Thus abandoned, the others turned their attention to the expanse before and below them; and one or two made their way down to the brink, unhooked a boat, ventured in, and, lifting the single pair of oars, were soon laboring gayly out and creating havoc on the placid waters.

As Mrs. Laudersdale continued to walk, the path which she followed slowly descended to the pebbly rim, rich in open spaces, slopes of verdure just gilding in the declining sun, and coverts of cool, deep shadow.  As she advanced leisurely, involved in pleasant fancy, something caught her eye, an unusual object, certainly, lying in a duskier recess; she drew nearer and hung a moment above it.  Some fallen statue among rank Roman growth, some marble semblance of a young god, overlaced with a vine and plunged in tall ferns and beaded grasses?  And she, bending there,—­was it Diana and Endymion over again, Psyche and Eros?  Ah, no!—­simply Mrs. Laudersdale and Roger Raleigh.  Only while one might have counted sixty did she linger to take the real beauty of the scene:  the youth, adopted, as it were, to Nature’s heart by the clustering growth that sprang up rebounding under the careless weight that crushed it; an attitude of complete and unconscious grace,—­one arm thrown out beneath the head, the other listlessly fallen down his side, while the hand still detained the straw hat; the profile, by no means classic, but in strong relief, the dark hair blowing in the gentle wind, the flush of sleep that went and came almost perceptibly with the breath, and the sunbeam that slanting round suddenly suffused the whole.  “Pretty boy!” thought Mrs. Laudersdale; “beautiful picture!” and she flitted on.  But Roger Raleigh was not a boy, although sleep, that gives back to all stray glimpses of their primal nature, endowed him peculiarly with a look of childlike innocence unknown to his waking hours.