ter's lodge. "His Grace, Miss, he passed through a
minute ago. He's going down this afternoon."

Yet, even while his fancy luxuriated in this scheme, he well knew that
he would not accomplish anything of the kind--knew well that he would
wait here humbly, eagerly, even though Zuleika lingered over her toilet
till crack o' doom. He had no desire that was not centred in her. Take
away his love for her, and what remained? Nothing--though only in the
past twenty-four hours had this love been added to him. Ah, why had
he ever seen her? He thought of his past, its cold splendour and
insouciance. But he knew that for him there was no returning. His boats
were burnt. The Cytherean babes had set their torches to that flotilla,
and it had blazed like match-wood. On the isle of the enchantress he was
stranded for ever. For ever stranded on the isle of an enchantress who
would have nothing to do with him! What, he wondered, should be done in
so piteous a quandary? There seemed to be two courses. One was to pine
slowly and painfully away. The other...

Academically, the Duke had often reasoned that a man for whom life holds
no chance of happiness cannot too quickly shake life off. Now, of a
sudden, there was for that theory a vivid application.

"Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer" was not a point by which he,
"more an antique Roman than a Dane," was at all troubled. Never had he
given ear to that cackle which is called Public Opinion. The judgment
of his peers--this, he had often told himself, was the sole arbitrage he
could submit to; but then, who was to be on the bench? Peerless, he was
irresponsible--the captain of his soul, the despot of his future. No
injunction but from himself would he bow to; and his own injunctions--so
little Danish was he--had always been peremptory and lucid. Lucid and
peremptory, now, the command he issued to himself.

"So sorry to have been so long," carolled a voice from above. The Duke
looked up. "I'm all but ready," said Zuleika at her window.

That brief apparition changed the colour of his resolve. He realised
that to die for love of this lady would be no mere measure of
precaution, or counsel of despair. It would be in itself a passionate
indulgence--a fiery rapture, not to be foregone. What better could
he ask than to die for his love? Poor indeed seemed to him now
the sacrament of marriage beside the sacrament of death. Death was
incomparably the greater, the finer soul. Death was t