Thus, with all his soul flowing to his lips, this grand heroic nature blesses the guilty woman, grovelling in the dust, and moves off stately and unflinching to confront the doom of Fate. Then, true to the yearning nature of her sex, yearning ever with keenest longings for the lost and the impossible, Guinevere leaps to her feet, the tide of a new love welling up in her wayward heart, fierce, cruel, and irresistible, because it must be henceforth utterly hopeless and forlorn. With her own hand she has put away her own happiness; and what happiness it might have been she feels too surely, now that no power on earth can ever make it hers again! Oh! for one word more from the kind, forgiving voice! Oh! for one look in the brave, clear, guileless face! But no. It is never to be. Never, never more! She rushes indeed to the casement, but Arthur is already mounted and bending from the saddle, to give directions for _her_ safety and _her_ comfort. “So she did not see the face, Which then was as an angel, but she saw— Wet with the mists and smitten by the lights— The dragon of the great Pendragon-ship Blaze, making all the night a steam of fire. And even then he turned; and more and more The moony vapours rolling round the king, Who seemed the phantom of a giant in it, Enwound him, fold by fold, and made him gray And grayer, till himself became as mist Before her, moving ghostlike to his doom.” “I think I like it better without your explanations and remarks,” observed Bones. “There is a proverb, my friend, about ‘refined gold,’ and ‘the lily,’ that you would do well to remember. Hang it! man, do you think nobody understands or appreciates poetry but yourself?” Perhaps I have over-aired him lately; but it seems to me that Bones is a good deal “above himself.” If I can only get him back into the cupboard, I have more than half a mind to lock him up for good and all. THE END RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED, LONDON & BUNGAY. FOOTNOTES: [1] “If that’s a fight indeed, Where you strike hard, and I stand still and bleed.” [2] “Cogitat Ursidius, sibi dote jugare puellam, Ut placeat domino, cogitat Ursidius.” [3] A narrow board, on which provisions, etc. are packed, to be dragged through the woods on these expeditions in the snow. Transcriber’s Notes pg 9 Changed: the value of “this here obserwation to: the value of “this here observation