fashionable life to his taste: its wheels within wheels ill suited the singleness of his own character; the feverish puerility of its envies and ambitions woke no chord of sympathy in him; and its hot-pressed atmosphere was too narrow, and too rarefied with heat and perfume, for the lungs which only breathed freely on the moorland and the prairie, on the ocean and the mountain-side. A man once bound to the great world is a slave till the day of his death, and Erceldoune could not have lived in chains.
"You are very like one, of the eagles of your own Border, Sir Fulke," said a French Duchesse at Liramar to him. She had been a beauty, and now, at forty, was a power—the customary development of a Frenchwoman.
"In love of liberty, madame, and solitude? Well, yes."
He thought how he and the golden eagle had fallen, much alike, and the thought crossed him vaguely, should he ever live to wish that the shot, like the eagle's, had told home?
"Yes, and if I were twenty years younger, I would tame you!" said the Duchesse, with a malicious smile. "Ah! how you would suffer, how you would beat your strong wings against the chains,
