[CHAPTER XLV.]
"IF I WERE A KING I WOULD RAISE HER TO MY THRONE!"
"As shines the moon in cloudless skies,
She in her poor attire was seen,
One praised her ankles, one her eyes,
One her dark hair, and lovesome mien,
So sweet a face, such angel grace,
In all that land had never been;
Cophetua swore a royal oath,
'This beggar maid shall be my queen!'"
Tennyson.
But, leaving our interests in the Garden City temporarily, we must journey across the dark-blue sea, to follow the fortunes of our noble hero, Harry Hawthorne.
As the intelligent reader has doubtless surmised already, he was the hero of the newspaper paragraph Mrs. Fitzgerald had read to her daughter, and he had crossed the seas to claim his own.
Young blood is often too hot, and an angry quarrel with his old father had made the heir of a noble name and fine estate a voluntary exile from home under distant skies, where he was not too proud to earn his bread by honest toil.
But all that was changed now.
In the English county of Devonshire, at the grand old castle home of Raneleigh, the old lord lay dead, and my lord, his son, must lay aside his masquerading and come home to wear the honors and the title that were his by ancestral right.