"No, no, it's only—it's only—the dog," gasped the knight, gripping his seat with both hands, as if it needed the greatest effort to keep himself still. "Hiss—s—s—s! I've such a terrible dislike to dogs. It's—it's in
my family," said the poor young man; and he could not recover his composure at all till the little animal that had disturbed him was carried away.
Then he had such a strange fashion of amusing himself in his own room where he slept. It was a spacious room, hung all round with arras; and often, after the household had gone to bed, those who slept nearest to the knight were awakened out of their sleep by the noise he made in running up and down, and here and there; scudding about over the floor, and even—as far as could be guessed by the sounds—clambering up the walls, just as though, instead of being a gracious high-bred young gentleman, he had been the veriest tomboy.
"I fear, Sir Knight, you do not always rest easily in your apartment," Eileen's old father said to him one morning after he had been making even more disturbance of this sort than usual. "We have rough ways here in the North, and perhaps the arrangement of
your sleeping quarters is not exactly to your liking?"
But the knight, when he began to say this, interrupted him hastily, and declared that he had never slept more comfortably in any room in his life, or more peacefully, he said; he was seldom conscious of even so much as awakening once. Of course, when he said this, Eileen and her father could only open their eyes, and come to the conclusion that the poor young knight was a somnambulist, and afflicted with the habit of running and leaping in his sleep.
Again, too, out-of-doors, it was very odd how it affected him to hear the birds sing. Whenever they began their songs, all sorts of nervous twitchings would come over him, and he would lick his lips and make convulsive movements with his hands; and his attention would become so distracted that he would quite lose the thread of his discourse if he were talking, or the thread of Eileen's, if she were talking to him. "It is because I
enjoy hearing them so much," he said once; and of course when he said so Eileen could only believe him; yet she could not help wishing he would show his pleasure in some other way than this curious one of setting his teeth and rolling his eyes, and looking much more as if he wanted to eat the birds than to listen to them.
Still, in spite of these and a good many other peculiarities, the young knight was very charming, and Eileen was very fond of him. They used to spend the happiest days together, wandering about the wild and beautiful country, often sitting for hours on the rocky shores of the dark lough, looking into the deep still water at their feet. It was a wild, romantic, lonely place, shut out from the sunlight by great granite cliffs that threw their dark weird shadows over it.
"Do you know there is a prophecy that our castle shall stand one day here in the middle of the lough?" Eileen said, laughing, once. "I don't know how it is to be done, but we