dence--a prouder ring--than any that Lord Evelyn had thrown into the
lines. She read at random--a passage here, a passage there--but always
it seemed to him that the voice was the voice of a herald proclaiming
the new awakening of the world--the evil terrors of the night
departing--the sunlight of liberty and right and justice beginning to
shine over the sea. And these appeals to England!
"Oh thou, clothed round with raiment of white waves,
Thy brave brows lightening through the gray wet air,
Thou, lulled with sea-sounds of a thousand caves,
And lit with sea-shine to thy inland lair,
Whose freedom clothed the naked souls of slaves
And stripped the muffled souls of tyrants bare,
Oh, by the centuries of thy glorious graves,
By the live light of the earth that was thy care,
Live, thou must not be dead,
Live; let thy armed head
Lift itself up to sunward and the fair
Daylight of time and man,
Thine head republican,
With the same splendor on thine helmless hair
That in his eyes kept up a light
Who on thy glory gazed away their sacred sight."
The cry there was in this voice! Surely his heart answered,
"Oh Milton's land, what ails thee to be dead!"
Was it in this very room, he wondered, that the old Polish refugee was
used to lift up his trembling hand and bid his compatriots drink to "the
white chalk-line beyond the sea?" How could he forget, as he and she
sat together that morning, and gazed across the blue waters to the far
and sunlit line of coast, the light that shone on her face as she said,
"If I were English, how proud I should be of England!" And this England
of her veneration and her love--did it not contain some, at least, who
would answer to her appeal?
Presently Natalie Lind shut the book and gently laid it down, and stole
out of the room. She was gone only for a few seconds. When she returned,
she had in her hand a volume of sketches, of which she had been speaking
during dinner.
He did not open this volume at once. On the contrary, he was silent for
a little while; and then he looked up, and addressed Natalie, with a
strange grave smile on his face.
"I was about to tell your father, Miss Lind, when you came in, that if I
could not translate for you, or carry a message across the Atlantic for
him, he might at least find something else that I can do. At all events,
may I say that I a
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