Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida'.djvu/10

2 been dark with the galleys of Norse pirates, nothing now was in sight but a fisher-boat in the offing; on the heather-moors, which had once echoed with the beat of horses' hoofs, as Douglas or Percy had scoured through the gorse for a dashing Border fray, or a Hotspur piece of derring-do, there was only now to be heard the flap of a wild-duck's wing as the flocks rose among the sedges; and the sole monarch of earth or sky was a solitary golden eagle soaring upward to the sun.

With a single swoop the bird had come down from his eyrie among the rocks, as though he were about to drop earthward; then, lifting his head, he spread his pinions in the wind that was blowing strong and fresh from Scotland through the heat of the August day, and sailed upward gloriously with slow majestic motion through the light. Far below him lay the white-crested waves gleaming far off, the purple stretch of the dark moors and marshes, the black still tarns, the rounded masses of the woods; higher and higher, leaving earth beneath him, he rose in his royal grandeur, fronting the sun, and soaring onward, and upward, against the blue skies and the snowy piles of clouds, rejoicing in his solitude, and kingly in his strength.

With his broad wings spread in the sun-gleam,