e to mankind,
the final outcome of that Revolution that, at the starting point, had
boded so nobly for human welfare--he was at last laid low, and all the
misery of the protracted struggle now belonged to the annals of the
past.

It was all over--but the waste! The waste of life and happiness, far
and wide away among innocent and uninterested beings, the waste
remained.

And, looking back on it, the most bitter portion of his own wrecked
life was the short time he had yet thought happy; three months, spent
as knight-errant.

How far they seemed, far as irrevocable youth, those days when, in the
wake of that love-compelling emissary, he moved from intrigue to
intrigue among the emigres in London, and their English sympathisers,
to bustling yet secret activity in seafaring parts!

The mechanical instrument directed by the ingenious mind of Cecile de
Savenaye; the discreet minister who, for all his young years, secured
the help of some important political sympathiser one day, scoured the
country for arms and clothing, powder and _assignats_ another; who
treated with smuggling captains and chartered vessels that were to run
the gauntlet on the Norman and Breton coast, and supply the means of
war to struggling and undaunted loyalists. All this relentless work,
little suited, on the whole, to an Englishman, and in a cause the
rights of which he himself had, up to then, refused to admit, was then
repaid a hundredfold by a look of gratitude, of pleasure even, a few
sweet moments of his lady's company, before being sent hence again
upon some fresh enterprise.

Ah, how he loved her! He, the youth on the threshold of manhood, who
had never known passion before, how he loved this young widowed mother
who used him as a man to deal for her with men, yet so loftily treated
him as a boy when she dealt with him herself. And if he loved her in
the earlier period of his thraldom, when scarce would he see her one
hour in the twenty-four, to what all-encompassing fervour did the
bootless passion rise when, the day of departure having dawned and
sunk, he found himself on board the privateer, sailing away with her
towards unknown warlike ventures, her knight to protect her, her
servant to obey!

On all these things mused the recluse of Scarthey, sinking deeper and
deeper into the past: the spell of haunting recollection closing on
him as he sat by his hearthside, whilst the increasing fury of the
gale toiled and troubled outside figh