But when alone, immured, away from every one, I lived my fullest life. My imagination went away boldly, admiringly, lovingly, to other men. They were not objects of jealousy, dear E * * *, for they were dead. I lived with the memories of the founders of our family—men who never sat upon the clerk’s stool, and could never have claimed the benefit of clergy—men with strong arms and stalwart frames, making their deeds of knightly prowess known in a hundred battles—with the memories of Hugh, and Walter, and Anselm, and Girard, and Reginald, and Matthew and John, who in the Holy Land fought at Prince Edward’s side, and rendered their red cross a terror to the Paynim. And my memory, only too tenacious, as you know, kept each noble form before me, with all the vividness of a present reality. I lived with them, too, in their pastimes, in which—side by side with the Black Prince, in the eyes of their sovereign, and their gracious mistress, his Queen Phillippa, at the tournaments, held on the very spots where I daily rode—they mimicked their glorious achievements upon the veritable fields of blood which they had won. I admired their splendid force, their brains not emasculate with such education as I saw around me, nor hampered with narrow trade tricks. I wondered what work they would be about if they were living to-day. I tried to imagine how any of the family could have got down, step by step, generation after generation, to studying Greek verbs, or calculating per cents. Hugo alive, I knew well, would not be a praying banker, but abroad in the free air, adventuring crusades, simply and naturally, in whatever way the time demanded, just as the man I love, simply and naturally, and yet so irresistibly, rescued the sepulchre of my buried hopes and desires, against the law and the power, the ignorance and the infidelity to human nature, of all around me. All things great are simple. In the crusades my ancestors adventured, they went a long way across the world. It was as far as the distance between groom and lady, but not further. They conquered what was their own by right of their nature and their belief, and with such a struggle as every one must undergo who undertakes the assertion of his right against social law. They conquered theirs as he did also his own; and does not his seem an act like, or nobler, than theirs? Is the rescue of a dead body a worthier act than the rescue of a living soul?