enly in her stride.

"Give Mr. Bruce your horse, Harry, and take the Czar," Guy said. "I'll
ride Kathleen home. Steady, old lady--don't fret. We are friends again
now."

"So you have got your pony back," I remarked to Forrester.

"Yes, and with interest," was the quiet reply. "I don't think he will
owe me much when I have done with him."

Though I had nothing on earth to do with it, I felt something like
compunction as I guessed what he meant.

Bruce's was a hard, money-loving nature, unromantic to a degree; but I
believe he would gladly have waked to find himself a houseless, landless
beggar, if he could thus have regained what Charley, with his soft
voice, and eyes, and manner, had stolen from him long ago.

Am I right in saying "stolen?" Perhaps he never had it; at all events,
he thought he had, which comes to nearly the same thing.

It is true that, unraveling the cord of a man's existence, you will
generally find the blackest hank in it twined by a woman's hand, but it
is not less common to trace the golden thread to the same spindle.

Great warrior, profound statesman, stanch champion of liberty as he was,
without Edith of the Swan's-neck, Harold would scarcely have risen into
a hero of romance. We do not quite despise Charles VII. when we think
how faithfully, in loneliness and ruin, the Lady of Beauty loved her
apathetic, senseless, discrowned king. Others never found it out, but
there must have been something precious hid in a dark corner of his
wayward heart near which Agnes nestled so long. We look leniently on
Otho--parasite and profligate--when we see him lingering on his last
march, on the very verge of the death-struggle, in the teeth of Galba's
legions, to decorate Popaea's grave. More in pity than in scorn, be sure,
did Tacitus, the historic epigrammatist, write "_Ne tum quidem veterum
immemor amorum_."

Was it in remorseful consciousness of having inflicted a deep,
irreparable wrong, that Isabel rode so constantly by Bruce's side,
striving, by all means of timid propitiation, to chase the cloud
lowering on his sullen face as we returned slowly home?

CHAPTER XV.

_"To de prokluein,
Epei genoit' an elusis, prochaireto;
Ison de to prostenein,
Toron gar exei sunorthron augais."_

My stay at Kerton Manor was drawing to a close. I had lingered there too
long already, and letters from neglected relatives and friends came,
reproachful, with every post. T