Walter Fenton, as he had no excuse, (though every wish,) to stay, would have retired with the rest; but this Lady Grizel's hospitality would by no means permit; he remained without much pressing, and after the parting or sleeping cup had been passed round, they separated for the night, and Walter, in the same apartment which had witnessed his combat with Captain Napier, lay down on his couch, not to sleep, but to brood over bright and joyous visions of the future that were never to be realised. One moment his heart glowed with unalloyed rapture and unclouded hope; and the next he was half despairing when he compared his humble fortune with that of Lilian. His whole inheritance was military service: of his family he knew nothing but their name. He was a child of war and misfortune; and these, more than he could foresee, were to be his companions through life. He was poor and obscure; while Lilian, with her artless beauty and girlish sweetness of manner, inherited the name and blood of one of the oldest and proudest houses in the Lowlands--barons to whom the Prestons of Gourton, the Kincaids of Warriston, and the Toweris of that ilk, were but mushroom citizens; and when he pictured the grey old mansion which sheltered him, so tall, so grim, and aristocratic in aspect and association, and the many acres of fertile field, of grassy pasture, and bosky wood that stretched around it, and weighed in the balance his half-pike......
Lovers are the most able of all self-tormentors. His horizon became fearfully overcast, and his bright visions seemed to end in smoke, till hope came again to his aid. Poor Walter! he was now fairly in love, and for the first time; his heart was unhackneyed in the ways of the world, and he knew not that the time might come when, with an inward smile, he would wonder that he ever thought so. But between his own anxious fears, the cawing of the rooks and creaking of the turret vanes, grey morning began to brighten the far off east before he slept.
With the first blush of dawn, old Elspat Elshender arrived with a confused but lamentable history of the disasters and terrors of the night--of how she had been carried away by the devil and Major Weir on a high trotting horse--how claps of thunder had rung around her cottage, and lightning consumed it--and that it was not until she was able to repeat the Lord's Prayer that they assumed the forms of Lord Clermistonlee and his hellicate butler, Juden Stenton, and thereafter vanished in a flash of fire, leaving Elsie among the nettles and whins at the avenue gate.