rilliana Harby. When Halfman was a lad gray Roland was Earl
of Harby, a choleric scholar, seeming celibate in grain, though the
title ran in direct male line. Suddenly, as Halfman now learned, gray
Roland married a maid some forty years younger than he, and she gave
him a child and died in the giving. This did not perpetuate the
title, for the child was a girl, but it gave the gray lord something
to cherish for the sake of his lost love. This child was now the Lady
Brilliana, whom gray Roland had adored and spoiled to the day of his
own death, hastened by a fit of rage at the news of the King's
failure to capture the five members. Since then the Lady Brilliana
had reigned alone at Harby, indifferent to suitors, and had flown the
King's flag at the first point of war. "By Heaven!" said Halfman, "I
will have a look at the Lady Brilliana."

II

HARBY

As he tramped the muddy hill-road his mind was busy. The scent from
the wet weeds on either side of him, heavy with the yester rains,
brought back his boyhood insistently, and his memory leaped between
then and now like a shuttlecock. He had dreamed dreams then; he was
dreaming dreams now, though he had thought he was done with dreams. A
few short months ago he had planned out his last part, the prosperous
village citizen, the authority of the gossips, respectable and
respected. His fancy had dwelt so fondly upon the house where he
proposed to dwell that he seemed to know every crimson eave of it,
every flower in the trim garden, the settle by the porch where he
should sit and smoke his pipe and drain his can and listen to the
booming of the bees, while he complacently savored the after-taste of
discreditable adventures. He knew it so well in his mind that he had
half come to believe that it really existed, that he had always owned
it, that it truly awaited his home-coming, and his feeling as he
entered the village that morning had been that he could walk straight
to it, instead of abiding at the inn and going hither and thither day
after day until he found in the market a homestead nearest to his
picture. And now he was walking away from it, walking fairly fast,
too, and walking whither? What business was it of his, after all, if
some sad-faced fellows from Cambridge tramped across country to lay
puritan hands upon Harby. What business was it of his if monarch
browbeat Parliament or Parliament defied king? He owed nothing to
either, cared nothing for either; what