THE LADY ISABEL.

A TALE OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

Chapter I.

Why don’t he come?

It was a splendid landscape. Far away before the eye stretched a wide, undulating country, checkered with lordly mansions, extensive woodlands, and here and there a quiet little village peeping out from amidst the verdant hills; while away on the verge of the horizon glittered a majestic river, which, winding hither and thither among the uplands, burst at length into view in a flood of glorious light, that lay like a shield of burnished silver in the distance.

Nor was the foreground of the scene less beautiful. Art had there been taxed to rival nature in loveliness. Terraces sinking one beneath another; a verdant lawn that seemed like velvet; rich, old lordly balustrades skirting the garden at your feet; and beyond, open glades, and clumps of forest trees thrown together in apparent confusion, but to produce which the utmost skill had been tasked, evinced at once the taste and opulence, of Lord Deraine, the owner of that rich domain. Such was the scene upon which two beings gazed on a lovely summer afternoon, in the year 16—.