He lent across, carefully removed some sprigs of box lying high on the sheet, then folded it down quickly and skilfully across the chest. Laurence was aware of a jealous devotion in his attitude. No hands save his own should again touch his dead master. But the sheet once arranged to his satisfaction, he stepped back, a pace or two, into the shadow of the damask curtains. Then the young man looked long and silently upon the dead. Notwithstanding its extreme emaciation, the face was gentler than in life. This was not merely owing to the closing of the brilliant eyes. An immense calm rested on it. The hunger of the intellect was stayed at last; and the face was majestic in its composure--the face of one who has passed, for ever, beyond the tyranny of desire. Looking on it, Laurence bowed himself reverently in spirit, while the conviction rooted itself in him, that of all virtues the most fertile, the most admirable, is courage. For the weak, the dismayed, for skulkers, liars, and dastards, in whatever department of action or of thought, there is small hope--so he told himself--either here or hereafter. The battle is to the strong; and, therefore, to be strong is the one and only thing which really signifies. And then it came to him, with a sense of sudden satisfaction, that this most desirable thing, strength, was altogether part of his own inheritance, did he choose to claim it. For the first time he appreciated the value of that strain of fanaticism resident in his blood. He had feared it a little, and apologised to himself for its existence heretofore. He had made a prodigious mistake; for now that strain of fanaticism revealed itself as among the most excellent things of his birthright. He remained motionless, gazing, no longer at the carven bed and its rigid burden, but away to the open casement--in at which came the breathing of the bleak night-wind--his head held high, and a singular compression about the corners of his mouth. Virginia?--Just now Virginia, and all and any obligation he might have contracted towards her, went for very little. He stood apart, complete in himself, regardless of custom, regardless even of so-called morality, should these interfere between him and his purpose. His sense of humour in regard to himself--humour, eternal enemy of all exaggerations and fixed ideas--was in abeyance. He knew that, knew it was dangerous. But then, as the courtly surgeon had so lately reminded him, what so adorable, after all, as those same "bright eyes of danger"--let danger come, how and when it may?--Conventionalities? He bade them pack, all the sort of them. Their day was over. The day of scruples was over likewise. His position was unexampled. He took the risks, along with the joys, of it. As his forefathers had been, so would he be. He felt an extraordinary exaltation and freedom of spirit. And feeling this he laughed a little, just as he had laughed when rallying his men amid the