are to be planted somehow in the middle of the water. That is what the people say. I shouldn't like to live here then. How gloomy it would be to have those great shadows always over us!" and the girl shivered a little, and stole her hand into her lover's, and they began to talk about the far different place where she should live; his beautiful palace, far away in the sunny country beyond the sea. She was never weary of hearing about the new place and new life that she was going to, and all the beauty and happiness that were going to be hers.
So time went on, until at last the day before the marriage-day came. Eileen had been showing her lover all her ornaments; she had a great number of very precious ones, and, to please him and amuse herself, she had been putting them all on, loading herself with armlets, and bracelets, and heavy chains of gold, such as the old Irish princesses used to wear, till she looked as gorgeous as a princess herself.
It was a sunny summer day, and she sat thinking to herself, "My married life will begin so soon now—the new, beautiful, strange life—and I will wear these ornaments in the midst of it; but where everything else is so lovely, will he think me then as lovely as he does now?"
Presently she glanced up, with a little shyness and a little vanity, just to see if he was looking at and thinking of her; but as she lifted up her head, instead of finding that his eyes were resting on her, she found——
Well, she found that the knight was certainly not thinking of her one bit. He was sitting staring fixedly at one corner of the apartment, with his lips working in the oddest fashion; twitching this way and that, and parting and showing his teeth, while he was clawing with his hands the chair on which he sat.
"Dear me!" said Eileen rather sharply and pettishly, "what is the matter with you?"
Eileen spoke pretty crossly; for as she had
on various previous occasions seen the knight conduct himself in this sort of way, her feeling was less of alarm at the sight of him than simply of annoyance that at this moment, when she herself had been thinking of him so tenderly, he could be giving his attention to any other thing. "What is the matter with you?" she said; and she raised herself in her chair and turned round her head to see if she could perceive anything worth looking at in that corner into which the knight was staring almost as if the eyes would leap out of his head.
"Why, there's nothing there but a mouse!" she said contemptuously, when she had looked and listened for a moment, and heard only a little faint scratching behind the tapestry.
"No, no, I believe not; oh, no, nothing but a mouse," replied the knight hurriedly; but still he did not take his eyes from the spot, and he moved from side to side in his chair, and twitched his head from right to left, and