y in the moon's light, and showing
like jasper. Where the shadows fell thickest, there was yet a mist of
colour. All about ran a brook, and babbled to itself. The spring crocus
lifted its head in moist midgrasses of the meadow, rejoiced with
freshness. The rugged heights seemed to clasp this one innocent spot as
their only garden-treasure; and a bank of hazels hid it from the castle
with a lover's arm.

'The moon will tell me,' mused Farina; 'the moon will signal me the hour!
When the moon hangs over the round tower, I shall know 'tis time to
strike.'

The song of the nightingales was a full unceasing throb.

It went like the outcry of one heart from branch to branch. The four long
notes, and the short fifth which leads off to that hurried gush of music,
gurgling rich with passion, came thick and constant from under the
tremulous leaves.

At first Farina had been deaf to them. His heart was in the dungeon with
Margarita, or with the Goshawk in his dangers, forming a thousand
desperate plans, among the red-hot ploughshares of desperate action.
Finally, without a sense of being wooed, it was won. The tenderness of
his love then mastered him.

'God will not suffer that fair head to come to harm!' he thought, and
with the thought a load fell off his breast.

He paced the meadows, and patted the three pasturing steeds.
Involuntarily his sight grew on the moon. She went so slowly. She seemed
not to move at all. A little wing of vapour flew toward her; it whitened,
passed, and the moon was slower than before. Oh! were the heavens
delaying their march to look on this iniquity? Again and again he cried,
'Patience, it is not time!' He flung himself on the grass. The next
moment he climbed the heights, and was peering at the mass of gloom that
fronted the sky. It reared such a mailed head of menace, that his heart
was seized with a quivering, as though it had been struck. Behind lay
scattered some small faint-winkling stars on sapphire fields, and a stain
of yellow light was in a breach of one wall.

He descended. What was the Goshawk doing? Was he betrayed? It was surely
now time? No; the moon had not yet smitten the face of the castle. He
made his way through the hazel-bank among flitting nightmoths, and
glanced up to measure the moon's distance. As he did so, a first touch of
silver fell on the hoary flint.

'Oh, young bird of heaven in that Devil's clutch!'

Sounds like the baying of boar-hounds alarmed him. They wh