Page:Cerise, a tale of the last century (IA cerisetaleoflast00whytrich).pdf/444

 Emerald enjoyed it as much as his master. When pulled up, he stopped willingly, his whole frame glowing with health and energy, his eye glancing, his ear alert, his broad red nostril drinking in the free moorland air like a cordial, and his bit ringing cheerfully, while he tossed his head in acknowledgment of the well-earned caress that smoothed the warm supple skin on his swelling neck.

The horse seemed a little puzzled too, looking round in vain for his friends the hounds, as if he wondered why he had been brought thus merrily over the moor, good fun as it was, without any further object than the ride.

In this matter there was little sympathy between man and horse. Sir George was thinking neither of hounds, nor hawks, nor any other accessories of the chase. He neither marked the secluded pool in which he had set up the finest stag of the season at bay last month, nor the ledge of rocks into which he ran his fox to ground last week. He was far back in the past. He was a young Musketeer again, with neither rank, nor wealth, nor broad acres, but with that limitless reversion of the future which was worth all his possessions ten times told. Yet even thus looking back to his earliest manhood, he could not shake himself free from the memory of Cerise. Ever since he could remember, that gentle face and those blue eyes had softened his waking thoughts and haunted him in his dreams; there was no period in his life at which she had not been the ideal of his imagination, the prize he desired. Even if he had not married her, he thought with a groan, he would still be cursed with this gnawing, festering pain that drove him out here into the wilderness for the mere bodily relief of incessant action. If he had not married her! Another thought stung him now. Perhaps then she might have continued to love him. Were they all alike, these women? All vain, unstable, irrational creatures; best acted on by the jugglery of false sentiment, alive only to the unworthy influence of morbid pique or unbridled passion, tempted to evil by an infamous notoriety, or dazzled by the glare of an impossible romance? He asked himself these questions, and his own observation afforded no satisfactory reply.

He had lived much at the Court of France, when that