tant
yet tender admiration is wrapt with the veil of verse."

"Quite so. Well, Master Adrian, just you send it to her."

"You don't think that she might be offended?" queried Adrian doubtfully.

"Offended!" said Martin, "if she is I know nothing of women" (as a
matter of fact he didn't.) "No, she will be very pleased; she'll take
it away and read it by herself, and sleep with it under her pillow until
she knows it by heart, and then I daresay she will ask you to come and
see her. Well, I must be off, but thank you for reading me the beautiful
poetry letter, Heer Adrian."

"Really," reflected Adrian, as the door closed behind him, "this is
another instance of the deceitfulness of appearances. I always thought
Martin a great, brutal fool, yet in his breast, uncultured as it is, the
sacred spark still smoulders." And then and there he made up his mind
that he would read Martin a further selection of poems upon the first
opportunity.

If only Adrian could have been a witness to the scene which at that very
moment was in progress at the works! Martin having delivered the key
of the box, sought out Foy, and proceeded to tell him the story. More,
perfidious one, he handed over a rough draft of the sonnet which he had
surreptitiously garnered from the floor, to Foy, who, clad in a leather
apron, and seated on the edge of a casting, read it eagerly.

"I told him to send it," went on Martin, "and, by St. Peter, I think he
will, and then if he doesn't have old Don Diaz after him with a pistol
in one hand and a stiletto in the other, my name isn't Martin Roos."

"Of course, of course," gasped Foy, kicking his legs into the air
with delight, "why, they call the old fellow 'Singe jaloux.' Oh! it's
capital, and I only hope that he opens the lady's letters."

Thus did Foy, the commonplace and practical, make a mock of the poetic
efforts of the high-souled and sentimental Adrian.

Meanwhile Adrian, feeling that he required air after his literary
labours, fetched his peregrine from its perch--for he was fond of
hawking--and, setting it on his wrist, started out to find a quarry on
the marshes near the town.

Before he was halfway down the street he had forgotten all about the
sonnet and the lovely Isabella. His was a curious temperament, and this
sentimentality, born of vainness and idle hours, by no means expressed
it all. That he was what we should nowadays call a prig we know, and
also that he possessed his father's, Montal