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 Popæa'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.
"Τὸ δὲ προκλύειν,
Ἐπεὶ γένοιτ᾽ ἂν ἤλυσις, προχαιρέτω‧