bent to her mih gentle reverence, which sat well upon him.
Pardon me, madam, I spoke something roughly, and men should not talk of these matters to women. There is one broad ground on which we can meet and understand one another, that of your goodness to a stranger, and his sincere recognition of it. Let that suffice!"
And Mother Veronica smiled wistfully on him, and after seventy years of unsullied devotion to the Supreme Church, found herself guilty of the horrible heresy of loving one whose soul was lost, and whose wild living will, and erring, wayward creeds, were the most fatal forms of tumult and revolt against which the Infallible Faith warned her!
An eagle from his native Cheviot-side fettered in a cage, would not have been less fitted for it than Erceldoune for his imprisonment at Monastica; as soon as he was strong enough to be raised in his couch, and was able to use his arm, he beguiled the time with a pastime which had often whiled away hours and days of enforced inaction, in quarantine, on board ship, becalmed in the tropics, or cooped up in Marseilles during the mistral. He painted extremely well. He was too thorough a man of
