leafage of English woodlands, made musical
with the movement and the song of innumerable birds that had their nests
among the hawthorn boughs and deep, cool foliage of elm and beech, an
old horse stood at pasture. Sleeping--with the sun on his gray, silken
skin, and the flies driven off with a dreamy switch of his tail, and
the grasses odorous about his hoofs, with dog-violets, and cowslips, and
wild thyme--sleeping, yet not so surely but at one voice he started,
and raised his head with all the eager grace of his youth, and gave a
murmuring noise of welcome and delight. He had known that voice in an
instant, though for so many years his ear had never thrilled to it;
Forest King had never forgotten. Now, scarce a day passed but what it
spoke to him some word of greeting or of affection, and his black, soft
eyes would gleam with their old fire, because its tone brought back
a thousand memories of bygone victory--only memories now, when Forest
King, in the years of age, dreamed out his happy life under the fragrant
shade of the forest wealth of Royallieu.

With his arm over the horse's neck, the exile, who had returned to his
birthright, stood silent a while, gazing out over the land on which
his eyes never wearied of resting; the glad, cool, green, dew-freshened
earth that was so sweet and full of peace, after the scorched and
blood-stained plains, whose sun was as flame, and whose breath was as
pestilence. Then his glance came back and dwelt upon the face beside
him, the proud and splendid woman's face that had learned its softness
and its passion from him alone.

"It was worth banishment to return," he murmured to her. "It was worth
the trials that I bore to learn the love that I have known----"

She, looking upward at him with those deep, lustrous, imperial eyes that
had first met his own in the glare of the African noon, passed her hand
over his lips with a gesture of tenderness far more eloquent from her
than from women less proud and less prone to weakness.

"Ah, hush! when I think of what her love was, how worthless looks my
own! How little worthy of the fate it finds! What have I done that every
joy should become mine, when she----"

Her mouth trembled, and the phrase died unfinished; strong as her love
had grown, it looked to her unproven and without desert, beside that
which had chose to perish for his sake. And where they stood with the
future as fair before them as the light of the day around them, he bow