ABSTRACT
It was on a beautiful afternoon towards the end of August, when Rosalie, retired to her usual seat on the hill, was again engaged in her now favourite occupation. The rays of the sun declining early in the afternoon, gilt the landscape with tints more than usually luxurious. Holmwood House, its windows always lighted up when these evening rays glanced on them, was an object which, as it continually forced itself upon her observation, she almost for the first time in her life wished to escape from. Yet insensibly it brought to her mind a train of ideas – melancholy, yet not to be repelled; her pencils, and drawing cards, were laid down on the turf while with folded arms, and her head reclined against the tree she was sitting under, she fell into a reverie. A long row of old stone pines, stretched their grotesque heads from the eastern side of the house towards a rising ground, where this wild and irregular avenue was terminated by an octagon temple, now falling fast to ruin; where Rosalie remembered to have passed many hours when she was a child, the happy thoughtless companion of the little Vyvians, who used to call this old summer-house their house, and to carry thither their playthings, and make their sportive arrangements, while their governess, a little old French woman, was accustomed to sit on the steps knitting or netting. The steps Rosalie could distinguish from her solitary seat on the hill, but the playful group and their odd little guardian were gone….. Rosalie recollected how happy she had been there, and already she had acquired that painful experience that had made her fear she should taste of unalloyed happiness no more. Her friend and protectress, Mrs. Vyvian, who now seemed to have deserted, from some unaccountable change of taste, the habitation she was once so fond of, appeared before her in imagination more pale and dejected than usual. She fancied she saw her slowly coming out of the little conservatory, which she had caused to be built, and in which she took peculiar pleasure; she had a nosegay in her hand for each of her girls – and Rosalie was once received under that appellation – and she beckoned to them as she saw them walking in the shrubbery, and, with one of her pensive smiles, gave to every one her little present. The Abbé Hayward, that excellent and venerable man, met her: benignity and pious resignation were in his countenance, as he endeavoured to find some conversation that might cheer the depressed spirits of Mrs. Vyvian. She bade 13her daughters and Rosalie walk before them; and, making a short tour in the plantations, seemed to remove her languor, and enable her to meet her family at supper with some appearance of cheerfulness.
