Chapter 11

Life hath its May, and is mirthful then:
The woods are vocal, and the flowers all odour;
Its very blast has mirth in't,--and the maidens,
The while they don their cloaks to screen their kirtles,
Laugh at the rain that wets them.
OLD PLAY.

Catherine was at the happy age of innocence and buoyancy of spirit,
when, after the first moment of embarrassment was over, a situation of
awkwardness, like that in which she was suddenly left to make
acquaintance with a handsome youth, not even known to her by name,
struck her, in spite of herself, in a ludicrous point of view. She
bent her beautiful eyes upon the work with which she was busied, and
with infinite gravity sate out the two first turns of the matrons upon
the balcony; but then, glancing her deep blue eye a little towards
Roland, and observing the embarrassment under which he laboured, now
shifting on his chair, and now dangling his cap, the whole man
evincing that he was perfectly at a loss how to open the conversation,
she could keep her composure no longer, but after a vain struggle
broke out into a sincere, though a very involuntary fit of laughing,
so richly accompanied by the laughter of her merry eyes, which
actually glanced through the tears which the effort filled them with,
and by the waving of her rich tresses, that the goddess of smiles
herself never looked more lovely than Catherine at that moment. A
court page would not have left her long alone in her mirth; but Roland
was country-bred, and, besides, having some jealousy as well as
bashfulness, he took it into his head that he was himself the object
of her inextinguishable laughter. His endeavours to sympathize with
Catherine, therefore, could carry him no farther than a forced giggle,
which had more of displeasure than of mirth in it, and which so much
enhanced that of the girl, that it seemed to render it impossible for
her ever to bring her laughter to an end, with whatever anxious pains
she laboured to do so. For every one has felt, that when a paroxysm of
laughter has seized him at a misbecoming time and place, the efforts
which he made to suppress it, nay, the very sense of the impropriety
of giving way to it, tend only to augment and prolong the irresistible
impulse.

It was undoubtedly lucky for Catherine, as well as for Roland, that
the latter did not share in the excessive mirth of the former. For,
seated as she was, with her back to the casement, Catherine could
easily escape the observation of the two matrons during the course of
their promenade; whereas Graeme was so placed, with his side to the
window, that his mirth, had he shared that of his companion, would
have been instantly visible, and could not have failed to give offence
to the personages