nce of their acquaintance, she had often regretted, she had
always retained for him the greatest affection. During these three
years he had still, in her inmost heart, remained her own Plantagenet,
her adopted brother, whom she loved, and in whose welfare her feelings
were deeply involved. The mysterious circumstances of her birth, and
the discoveries to which they had led, had filled her mind with a
fanciful picture of human nature, over which she had long brooded. A
great poet had become her ideal of a man. Sometimes she had sighed,
when musing over her father and Plantagenet on the solitary seashore
at Weymouth, that Cadurcis, instead of being the merely amiable, and
somewhat narrow-minded being that she supposed, had not been invested
with those brilliant and commanding qualities which she felt could
alone master her esteem. Often had she, in those abstracted hours,
played with her imagination in combining the genius of her father with
the soft heart of that friend to whom she was so deeply attached. She
had wished, in her reveries, that Cadurcis might have been a great
man; that he might have existed in an atmosphere of glory amid the
plaudits and admiration of his race; and that then he might have
turned from all that fame, so dear to them both, to the heart which
could alone sympathise with the native simplicity of his childhood.

The ladies withdrew. The Bishop and another of the guests joined them
after a short interval. The rest remained below, and drank their wine
with the freedom not unusual in those days, Lord Cadurcis among them,
although it was not his habit. But he was not convivial, though he
never passed the bottle untouched. He was in one of those dark humours
of which there was a latent spring in his nature, but which in old
days had been kept in check by his simple life, his inexperienced
mind, and the general kindness that greeted him, and which nothing but
the caprice and perversity of his mother could occasionally develope.
But since the great revolution in his position, since circumstances
had made him alike acquainted with his nature, and had brought all
society to acknowledge its superiority; since he had gained and felt
his irresistible power, and had found all the world, and all the
glory of it, at his feet, these moods had become more frequent. The
slightest reaction in the self-complacency that was almost unceasingly
stimulated by the applause of applauded men and the love of the
loveliest