brilliant beauties down at Liramar, where he had been bidden by the great Minister as soon as he was able to leave Monastica, and where that unworn octogenarian was himself taking a rare short rest in the November of the year. His lordship was imperative in his summons to his favourite courier, to whom the southern air was likely to give back the lost strength which was still only returning slowly and wearily to muscles and limbs whose force had been "even as the lions of Libya."
The story of his single-handed peril, his choice of death rather than disloyalty to his trust, in the silent ravine of the Moldavian pine-woods, had sent a thrill of its own chivalry through the languid, nil admirari, egotistic, listless pulses of high-bred society. Erceldoune was the hero of the hour if he chose; and the Border Eagle might have folded his strong pinions under the soft caress of a thousand white hands. Bat he did not choose: he had never cared for women—they had never gained any hold on him. Steeped in vice in his earliest years, sensuality had little power over his manhood; and the languid intrigues, the hollow homage, the "love" of the drawing-rooms—pulseless, insipid, artificial, frivolous, paré à la mode—were still more contemptible, and absolutely impossible to him. Nor was
