g in with a stormy capriccio, which was usually
charmed into silence by some sudden turn in the witching melodies of
Matilda. They had therefore naturally calculated, as far as their wild
spirits calculated at all, on the same effects from the same causes. But
the circumstances of the preceding day had made an essential alteration
in the case. The baron knew well, from the intelligence he had received,
that the earl's offence was past remission: which would have been of
less moment but for the awful fact of his castle being in the possession
of the king's forces, and in those days possession was considerably more
than eleven points of the law. The baron was therefore convinced
that the earl's outlawry was infallible, and that Matilda must either
renounce her lover, or become with him an outlaw and a fugitive. In
proportion, therefore, to the baron's knowledge of the strength and
duration of her attachment, was his fear of the difficulty of its ever
being overcome: her love of the forest and the chase, which he had never
before discouraged, now presented itself to him as matter of serious
alarm; and if her cheerfulness gave him hope on the one hand by
indicating a spirit superior to all disappointments, it was suspicious
to him on the other, as arising from some latent certainty of being soon
united to the earl. All these circumstances concurred to render
their songs of the vanished deer and greenwood archery and Yoicks and
Harkaway, extremely mal-a-propos, and to make his anger boil and bubble
in the cauldron of his spirit, till its more than ordinary excitement
burst forth with sudden impulse into active manifestation.

But as it sometimes happens, from the might
Of rage in minds that can no farther go,
As high as they have mounted in despite
In their remission do they sink as low,
To our bold baron did it happen so. [2]

For his discobolic exploit proved the climax of his rage, and was
succeeded by an immediate sense that he had passed the bounds of
legitimate passion; and he sunk immediately from the very pinnacle of
opposition to the level of implicit acquiescence. The friar's spirits
were not to be marred by such a little incident. He was half-inclined,
at first, to return the baron's compliment; but his love of Matilda
checked him; and when the baron held out his hand, the friar seized it
cordially, and they drowned all recollection of the affair by pledging
each other in a cup of canary.

The f