And at that she cast herself upon the floor and hid her face. Only the convulsive heaving of her body witnessed to the breaking of the storm which had been so long pent up within her. Alas! what unsuspected woman was revealed here, what passion undercrushed, and what desolation! It was remarked that night in Spring Garden that never yet had the famous harpist so divinely justified his reputation. He played like one transported, lost to earth. Many of his ravished audience were in tears, while the very pigeons, petted and fearless, seemed to gather about his feet. Nay, there was one, it was said, a tender white dove, that flew to his shoulder and settled there for a while, making love at his ear. But that may pass for a legend. CHAPTER X It may appear to some people that Hamilton was taking a prodigious amount of trouble to reach by a roundabout way a conclusion at least as presumptively attainable by direct means as by sinuous; and, in this connection, Montrose’s quatrain may possibly occur to them-- He either fears his fate too much, Or his desert is small, Who dares not put it to the touch To gain or lose it all. Without, however, stopping to defend or disallow the moral applicability of these lines to our case in point, it may be offered to such objectors that, generally speaking, the rewards most hardly won are the rewards most highly prized by men, that five-sixths of the satisfaction of success lie in the difficulties surmounted to achieve it (the thing may be be-adaged to infinity), and that if there was a scamp in this world alive to that truism, it was your Restoration scamp, with his plethora of experience in the ways of facile conquest. Who, indeed, could for ever take joy or credit of shooting the sitting pheasant, of hunting the fox or the hare if his quarry, the moment it were pursued, squatted down to be trodden on? Rather, would it be his object to scare away, with a view to stalking and circumventing, the affrighted game, than, by coming to straight conclusions with it, to miss all the excitement of the chase.