"And so at last we find my tribe, And so I set thee in the midst . . . Henceforth be loved as heart can love. . . . It is our life at thy feet we throw To step with into light and joy." The Duchess heard, and knew, and was saved. It needed courage--needed swift decision--needed even some small abandonment of "duty." But she saw what she must do, and did it. Duty has two voices often; the Duchess heard the true voice. If she was bewitched, it was by the spell that was ordained to save her, could she hear it. . . . And that she heard aright, that, leaving the castle, she left the hell where love lives not, we know from the old huntsman: "For the wound in the Duke's pride rankled fiery; So they made no search and small inquiry"; and Gipsies thenceforth were hustled across the frontier. Even the Duchess could not make love valid there. Reality was out of them. . . . True, the huntsman, after thirty years, is still her sworn adorer. He had stayed at the castle: "I must see this fellow his sad life through-- He is our Duke, after all, And I, as he says, but a serf and thrall"; --but, as soon as the Duke is dead, our friend intends to "go journeying" to the land of the Gipsies, and there find his lady or hear the last news of her: "And when that's told me, what's remaining?" For Jacynth is dead and all their children, and the world is too hard for his explaining, and so he hopes to find a snug corner under some hedge, and turn himself round and bid the world good-night, and sleep soundly until he is waked to another world, where pearls will no longer be cast before swine that can't value them. "_Amen._" But at any rate this talk with his friend has made him see his little lady again, and everything that they did since "seems such child's play," with her away! So her love did one thing even there--just as one likes to think that the unhappier Duchess, the Italian one, left precisely such a memory in the heart of that officious fool who broke the bough of cherries for her in the orchard. And is it not good to think that almost immediately after _The Flight of the Duchess_ was published, Browning was to meet the passionate-hearted woman whom _he_ snatched almost from the actual death-bed that had been prepared for her with as much of pomp and circumstance as was the Duchess's life-in-death! With this in mind, it gives one a queer thrill to read those lines of silenced prophecy: "I foresee and I could foretell Thy future portion, sure and well: But those passionate eyes speak true, speak true, Let them say what thou shalt do!" FOOTNOTES: