ed his hands behind his head and lay so, smiling with mingled
bitterness and joy.

"It has begun!" he said. "I have heard them tell of it--of how one
woman's face came back again and again, of how one pair of eyes would
look into a man's and would not leave him, nor let him rest. It has
begun for me, too. For good or evil, it has begun."

Until this night he had told himself, and believed himself in the
telling, that he had been strangely haunted by thoughts of a strange
creature, because the circumstances by which she was encompassed were
so unusual and romantic as would have lingered in the mind of any man
whether old or young; and this he had been led to feel the more
confident of, since he was but one of a dozen men, and indeed each one
who knew of her existence appeared to regard her as the heroine of a
play, though so far it was to them but a rattling comedy. But from this
night he knew a different thing, and realised that he was face to face
with that mystery which all men do not encounter, some only meeting
with the mere fleeting image of it and never knowing what the reality
is--that mystery which may be man's damnation or his heaven, his
torture and heart-sickening, or his life and strength and bliss. What
his would bring to him, or bring him to, he knew not in the least, and
had at times a pang at thought of it, but sometimes such a surge of joy
as made him feel himself twice man instead of once.

When he went forth to ride the next day it was with a purpose clear in
his mind. Hitherto all he had seen or heard had been by chance, but if
he saw aught this morning 'twould be because he had hoped for and gone
to meet it.

"Before I cross the sea," was his thought, "I would see her once again
if chance so favors me. I would see if there seems any new thing in her
face, and if there is--if this is no wild jest and comedy, but means
that she has wakened to knowing herself a woman--I shall know when I
see her eyes and can carry my thought away with me. Then when I come
back--'twill be but a few months at the most--I will ride into
Gloucestershire the first week I am on English soil, and I will go to
her and ask that I may be her servant until she learns what manner of
man I am and can tell me to go--or stay."

If Sir Jeoffry and his crew had dreamed that such a thought worked in
the mind of one of the richest young noblemen in England--he a Duke and
handsome enough to set any woman's heart beating--as he rode t