The student endeavoured to gain more precise information, but they had none to furnish him.  They began to be solicitous for a compensation for what they had already imparted; and, recollecting the loneliness of the place, and the vagabond character of his companions, he was glad to give them a gratuity, and to hasten homewards.

He sat down to his studies, but his brain was too full of what he had seen and heard; his eye was upon the page, but his fancy still returned to the tower; and he was continually picturing the little window, with the beautiful head peeping out; or the door half open, and the nymph-like form within.  He retired to bed, but the same object haunted his dreams.  He was young and susceptible; and the excited state of his feelings, from wandering among the abodes of departed grace and gallantry, had predisposed him for a sudden impression from female beauty.

The next morning, he strolled again in the direction of the tower.  It was still more forlorn, by the broad glare of day, than in the gloom of evening.  The walls were crumbling, and weeds and moss were growing in every crevice.  It had the look of a prison, rather than a dwelling-house.  In one angle, however, he remarked a window which seemed an exception to the surrounding squalidness.  There was a curtain drawn within it, and flowers standing on the window-stone.  Whilst he was looking at it, the curtain was partially withdrawn, and a delicate white arm, of the most beautiful roundness, was put forth to water the flowers.

The student made a noise, to attract the attention of the fair florist.  He succeeded.  The curtain was further drawn, and he had a glance of the same lovely face he had seen the evening before; it was but a mere glance—­the curtain again fell, and the casement closed.  All this was calculated to excite the feelings of a romantic youth.  Had he seen the unknown under other circumstances, it is probable that he would not have been struck with her beauty; but this appearance of being shut up and kept apart, gave her the value of a treasured gem.  He passed and repassed before the house several times in the course of the day, but saw nothing more.  He was there again in the evening.  The whole aspect of the house was dreary.  The narrow windows emitted no rays of cheerful light, to indicate that there was social life within.  Antonio listened at the portal, but no sound of voices reached his ear.  Just then he heard the clapping to of a distant door, and fearing to be detected in the unworthy act of eavesdropping, he precipitately drew off to the opposite side of the road, and stood in the shadow of a ruined archway.

He now remarked a light from a window in the tower.  It was fitful and changeable; commonly feeble and yellowish, as if from a lamp; with an occasional glare of some vivid metallic colour, followed by a dusky glow.  A column of dense smoke would now and then rise in the air, and hang like a canopy over the tower.  There was altogether such a loneliness and seeming mystery about the building and its inhabitants, that Antonio was half inclined to indulge the country people’s notions, and to fancy it the den of some powerful sorcerer, and the fair damsel he had seen to be some spell-bound beauty.