'I wonder who bought it?' said she.
'That matters little,' replied Mary; 'his fancy, however, will give you encouragement, nevertheless.'
Ellinor blushed with pleasure. Her picture was sold, but she little knew to whom.
She was now convalescent, able to go abroad, and, like Mary, she had also the coincidence of a strange and unexpected meeting.
One day, when the weather was clear and sunny for the season, she went to Hyde Park with her sketch-book, encouraged to fresh efforts by her success, to make another drawing. The subject was to be some quaint old trees she had noticed, and which she hoped might find a purchaser in some one who knew the locality.
October had given these old oaks its choicest tints, and, while some of their leaves were russet-green, others were like burnished bronze, and were red of many hues; and, all the better for artistic purposes, the chief of these venerable and gnarled trees had a story, for under it Horace Walpole, as he tells us, was robbed in the winter of 1749 by the fashionable footpad Maclean.
'One night in the beginning of November,' he writes, 'as I was returning from Holland House by moonlight, about ten o'clock, I was attacked by two highwaymen in Hyde Park, and the pistol of one of them, going off accidentally, razed the skin under my eye, left some marks of shot on my face, and stunned me. The ball went through my hat, and, if I had sat an inch nearer to the left side, it must have gone through my head.'
This event occurred within half-a-mile of Piccadilly, and Ellinor, thinking how it would enhance the value of her little landscape, set to work in sketching the group of trees.
So intent was she with her pencil that for some time she was unaware that she was observed, or that anyone was near her in that part of the then usually deserted Park, till she suddenly saw a soldier—a hussar—standing before her.
'Robert—Robert Wodrow!' she exclaimed, in a strange voice all unlike her own, as the pencil dropped from her nerveless hand. 'What does this dress—what does all this mean?'