CHAPTER X.
THE SOVEREIGN OF THE ROUND TABLE.
All the day Eroeldoune spent aimlessly; he took his rifle and went over wild tracts of outlying country, he never asked or knew where, but be scarcely fired a shot; the hours seemed endless till they brought the evening, and he walked on and on through sear deserted valleys, and over hills thick clothed with the sombre cypress, with little object except to throw off the fever in him by exhausting exercise and bodily fatigue. The tumultuous happiness and the restless disquiet he felt were alike new to him; he was not a man easily to be the fool of his passions, or to let loose his judgment in their intoxication; he had held them down in almost as stern a curb as any of the iron knights of the Calatrava, and now, in solitude, and in the calmness of morning, he saw his own peril and his own madness as he had not in the enchantment of her presence, or in the impassioned phantasies of
