“Ah, lovers who sadden without love, I think of you,” she said again, lifting a gay and radiant face, and speaking with tender playfulness. “For you, poor lovers, you who bear love’s cross, and may not wear love’s crown—for you I pray! Oh, doleful company, would that I could make you happy, too!” Laughing a little to herself, she let her clasped hands fall, and with a slow, harmonious movement, glided, musing, from the room. She went up-stairs to the studio, and sitting by her desk, wrote these lines to Harrington. “Flos equitum!—flower of chevaliers! Be sure to come this evening. A matter of the greatest importance, so do not fail. This is a vermilion edict. Hear and obey! MURIEL.” “Good!” said she, laughing softly, as she folded the note. “A piebald epistle truly. But, like Mercutio’s wound, it is enough. And now for some dinner, for no beautifulest poet, as Carlyle says, but must dine, and lovers are subject to the same condition. Indeed, I think love gives one an appetite, for I am quite famished.” Gaily talking to herself in this way, she went down-stairs, dispatched Patrick with the note, and sat down to her solitary dinner, which she had ordered to be served at this hour. It was well that she had written to Harrington, for the young scholar, his mysterious trepidation increasing as the hour drew near when he was to convey Antony to Temple street, had decided, when the note reached him, to send Captain Fisher with the fugitive instead. Of course he revoked his decision, when he read the missive, and quaking at heart, and wondering what the “matter of the greatest importance” could be, he set out about half-past eight o’clock, with Antony. He had previously told the poor man that he knew his brother, and was going to take him to him that evening, and Antony was lost between utter astonishment and delighted expectation. To his simple mind, this strong, beautiful, friendly, masterful Harrington, who lived in a house full of books, who treated him as he had never dreamed even of being treated by a white man, and who completed his wonderful benefactions by taking him to see his brother, was little less than a god. Regarding him with actually servile reverence, Antony thought he knew everything and could do anything, and that he was the greatest man in the world.