strength, liberty, manhood, independence, honour;-how many have forfeited or never owned those birthrights! You chose very wisely to take a Spartan freedom rather than the slavery of the world."

Erceldoune shook himself with a restless gesture, as an eagle chained shakes his wings:

he quoted, warmly.

"Geh! Ich diene nicht Vasallen !"

She laughed, a little mockingly, a little mournfully, but her gaze dwelt on him with homage and sympathy to the fiery independence of his nature.

"Never the vassal of a slave, Sir Fulke? Then never be the slave of a woman!"

He looked at her, and there was something wistful in the look; he wondered if she knew her power over him, and if she made a jest of it; he could not answer her with that gay badinage, that light homage, that subtle flattery, to which she was accustomed; he felt too earnestly, too passionately; a man of few words, save when keenly moved or much interested, he could not give himself to the utterance of those airy nothings, while all his life was stirred with love he could not name.

"A woman's slave? No-I hope not while there is manhood in me. Yesterday I would have taken my oath never to become one, but

now

His words were rapid and low-spoken, and he paused; they had been uttered rather to himself than to Idalia. At that moment the great Servian hound entered through the open window from the terrace, and stood looking at him with its wolf-like crest up, its fine eyes watchful and menacing, and a low angry growl challenging him as a stranger. It was a magnificent brute, massive in build, lithe in limb, pure bred, and nearly as tall as a young deer.

Erceldoune turned to him and stretched out his hand.

"Ah! there is my gallant friend, your hound. I owe him a debt too; what a noble fellow!"

The animal stood a second looking at him, then went and laid down like a lion couchant at the feet of the Countess Vassalis, with that jealousy of their mistress which almost all dogs show in the presence of

men.

She laid her hand on his great head—a hand of exceeding fairness and elegance, with the sapphires and diamonds glittering there, which Mother Veronica had noted, with a recluse's quick appreciation of worldly things.

"Sulla! Sulla! you are not courteous. You must forgive him, Sir Fulke; he has so often been my only champion, that he is apt to be a little rash in his chivalry."

“I honour him for his fidelity. But, your only champion? Where was the chivalry of the world to leave such a post to a dog?"

She smiled, a little contemptuously.

"Where! In idle vows and poets' dreams, I imagine; its only home in any time, most likely. The Ritter Tannhäuser swore his knightly homage in the Venusberg, but ere long he turned on her who gave him his delight:

O Venus schöne Fraue mein,
Ihr seyn eine Teufelinne!

The German legend is very typical!"

"Tannhäuser was a cur!" said Erceldoune, with an eloquent warmth in his voice rather than in his words. "What matter what she waswhat matter whence she came-she was the sovereign of his life; she had given him love, and glory, and delight; she was his. It was enough -enough to lose a world for, and to hold it well lost!"

He paused suddenly in the passionate poetic impulse on which he spoke, which had broken up in his heart for the first time, utterly alien as he had believed to his nature, to his temperament, to his will. It was of her and of himself that he thought, not of the old Teutonic Minessinger's Legend of Tannhäuser; and the rich glow of the Eastern sunlight, slanting across the mosaic pavement, shone in the dark eagle lustre of his eyes, and lent its warmth to the Murillo-like bronze of his cheek.

No woman could have looked on him unmoved; there was such grand, reckless loyalty in the words, such trustful, daring chivalry on his face! The slight flush, the beautiful smile that he had seen there the night before when she had recognised him with that one word, "You!" came upon her as she looked at him, to be mingled a moment after with something of wonder. She was a woman of the world; that noble truthfulness, that gallant faith, that knightly earnestness were new and very strange to her. They touched her.

"If Tannhäuser had loved like that—who knows?-even she, the Teufelinne, might have been redeemed. She could not have been faithless to such faith," she said, half musingly, rather following out her thoughts than addressing him; and in her voice there was a vague, pathetic pain.

Mad words rose to his lips in reply-words that he had to hold down in silence with an iron curb; the room seemed dizzy round him, the odours of the flowers reeled in his brain as though they were narcotic perfumes; he watched dreamily, like a man half blinded, her hand, with the blue flashing sapphires, wander among the scarlet blossoms, and toy with the waters of the fountain.

It was a delirium: and, for all its feverish pain, he would not have exchanged it to have back the happiest and most tranquil hour of his past. He had dreamed of her, till he had loved her as utterly as ever a man loved a woman; he was in her presence-at last!—and in the presence of Idalia all love that before might be but a dream became at once with giant growth a passion. She did not seem to seek her power; but such power was hers in its widest magnitude of empire. In truth, she was a little weary of it, as sovereigns are weary of their crowns.

"You give fresh air the preference, Sir Fulke-will you come into my gardens? They are very wild, but I like them the better for that. Nature is a finer artist after all than any Lenôtre or Paxton," she said, as she rose with that half-languid grace which bespoke something of Oriental inheritance in her, and, sweeping her black Spanish laces round her, moved out on to the terrace, while the hound Sulla followed close, with his watchful eyes fixed jealously on Erceldoune.

The gardens were, in truth, wild as the neglect of years could make

them, but they had been originally palace grounds, and all the colour and luxuriance of unchecked vegetation made them beautiful, with their wildernesses of myrtle, cacti, and pomegranates, and their stretches of untrained roses blooming round the splashing waters of the marble and porphyry fountains.

"Little has been done here for years, and yet there is a loveliness in them, is there not, not to be had in trimmed and trained châteaux gardens ?" she said, as she turned so that the sun fell on her face with its delicate haughty lustre, its richness and fairness of hue. "Yes! there is a loveliness," he answered her, as his eyes looked down into hers, "greater than I ever believed in before." She laughed a little; slightly, carelessly.

"Sir Fulke! what enthusiasm. So great a traveller as yourself cannot, surely, find anything so new and striking in a wild Turkish garden ?” she said, half amusedly, half languidly, a trifle ironically, purposely misapprehending his words.

The look came into his eyes that had been there before, when she had bade him never be the slave of a woman; proud, and yet wistful.

You

"I do not know that!" he said, almost bitterly; "but I know that the gardens may be as fatal as those of Uhland's linden-tree. remember how the poem begins:

Wol vor der Burg zu Garten

Stund eine Linde grün.
Es kam auf seinem Farten
Wolfdieterich dahin;

So je ein kühner Degen,
Darunter ausgeruht,

Der muszte Strides pflegen

Ob solchem Frevelmuth ?"*

The German lines took an undue effect on her; resentment came on her face, haughty inquiry into her eyes, that she turned full on him in some surprise, some anger, and yet more, as it seemed to him, disquiet. Then all these faded, and a profound sadness followed them.

"Yes, I remember the poem," she said, calmly. "Take warning by Wolfdieterich, Sir Fulke, and do not lie under the linden! Rather, to speak more plainly, and less poetically, never come where you do not see where your footsteps will lead you. You know nothing of me, save my name; leave me without knowing more. It will be the best, believe me -far best."

She paused as she spoke, as they moved down the cedar avenue, the roses strewing the grass path, and the Bosphorus flashing its bright waves through the boughs. The singularity of the words struck him less at that moment than the injunction they gave him to leave her. Leave

* Within the palace garden stood
A linden green and gay,

The wandering Wolfdieterich
Came thither on his way;

Beneath it lay he down to rest,

Though never so brave was he,

He earned many a strife throughout his life
For that audacity.

her!-in the very moment when his quest had been recompensed by the trouvaille; in the first hour when, at last in her presence, at last in her home, the fugitive glory of his dreams was made real, and in Idalia he had found the woman who had literally been to him the angel of life! Erceldoune would not have been Erceldoune, much less would he have been what he was-in love-if the words had left on him one shadow of warning, one instant's thought, that to obey them might be wisest. Even their extraordinary strangeness scarcely struck him, so wholly was he absorbed by their meaning.

Beneath the sun-bronze of his face she saw the blood come and go quickly and painfully; he paused, too, and stood facing her in the cedar aisle, with that gallant and dauntless manhood which lent its kingliness to him by nature.

"Best? For which of us, madame ?"

"Why? Refuse, because it is for yourself that I have spoken ?" "Yes. If my presence jeopardised you, I must obey, and rid you of it; if I alone be concerned, I refuse obedience, because I would give up all I have ever prized on earth-save honour-to be near what I have sought so long, and sought so vainly."

It was all but a declaration of love, to a woman of whom he knew nothing, save her beauty and her name. Without thinking to what it pledged him, he had spoken it in the singleness and passion of his heart; but the Countess Vassalis passed over it as a courtesy, a homage, a testimony of gratitude, of friendship; nothing more. She read him as she would have read a book, but she did not show her knowledge.

you

our

"You are very rash," she said, softly, without a touch of irony now. "I have said truly, I have said wisely, it will be best for that you friendship should not continue-should barely commence. If you persist in it, the time will, in every likelihood, come when will condemn me, and reproach yourself for it. I speak in all sincerity, even though I do not give you my reasons. You consider-very generously-that you owe me a debt; it would be best paid by obeying what I say now, and forgetting me, as if we had never met."

She spoke with the courtly ease of a woman of the world, of a woman used to speak and to be obeyed, to guide and to be followed; but there was a certain inflection of regretful bitterness in her voice, a certain shadow of troubled weariness in her eyes, as if she did not send him from her without some reluctance. They were strange words; but Idalia had known too many of the multiform phases of life to have a woman's fear of singularity or of its imputation, and had passed through unfamiliar paths with a haughty grace wholly, solely her own.

His frank eyes met hers, and there was in them a passionate pain. "You bid me pay my debt in the only coin I cannot command. Obey you, I will not. Forget you, I could not!"

She smiled, half sadly, half disdainfully.

Twenty-four hours' absence soon supplies any one with oblivion!" "It is a year since I saw you in the Sicilian boat, yet I have not forgotten. I shall not while I have life."

His voice was very low; he was wounded, but he could not be offended or incensed-by her.

She bent her head with a sweet and gracious gesture of amende and of concession.

"True! Pardon me; I wronged you. Nevertheless, indeed rather because you remember so well-too well-I still say to you, Go, and let us remain as strangers!'"

All that was noblest in Idalia spoke in those words; all that lingered, best and truest, in her, prompted them. She wished, for his peace,

that he should leave her she knew his heart better far than he himself; she wished-now, at the least-that the strong, dauntless, brave, and gallant manhood she had rescued, should be spared from all shadow from her own, from all love for her own; she wished-now, at leastto save him. From what? From herself.

Yet it was not without pain, though that pain was veiled, that she spoke.

He looked at her steadily, the earnest, open, loyal nature of the man striving in vain to read the motive and the meaning of the woman, and failing as men ever do.

Fulke Erceldoune was a proud man, the prouder for his poverty, but before Idalia he laid down his pride as knights laid down their iron casques when they bent before their Lady of the Silver Shield; he bowed low, and his face grew very white under the warm brown left there by Asian and Algerian suns.

"If you command it, I must obey. My presence shall be no forced burden upon you. But you cannot command on me forgetfulness, and I would wish you had been merciful before, and left me to die where I lay."

Unconsidered, spoken from his heart, and the more profound in pathos for their brief simplicity, the words moved her deeply, so deeply, that tears-rarest passion of all with her—that she had never known for years, rose in her eyes as they dwelt on him; her face flushed slightly, her lips parted, but without speech; she stood silent.

The day was very still; sheltered by the cedars from the heat, the golden light quivered about them; there was no sound but of the cicala among the pomegranate leaves, and of the waves breaking up against the marble palace stairs; neither ever forgot that single hour of the Eastern day when on one word the future hung. His eyes watched her longingly; he did not ask who she was, whence she came, for what reason she thus bade him go from her; he only remembered the glory of her loveliness, and the words in which she had said, "Go, and let us remain henceforth as strangers."

"Countess Idalia-an -answer me. Do you, for yourself, command me to leave you?"

His voice trembled as he asked it, a rich deep voice mellow as a clarion, to which that tremor had never come in all the years of his life.

Her eyes dwelt on him; the eyes, then, of his remembrance, filled with liquid light and a beautiful humid brilliance; she was silent a moment still, her hand lying on the wolf-hound's head, her face shadowed with a great sadness.

"For myself? Oh no! I cannot command you-so; it is only for your sake

She paused. What was, in truth, in her thoughts it would have been