Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida'.djvu/11

Rh he swept through the silent air, his eyes looking at the luminance which blinds the eyes of men, his empire taken in the vastness of the space that monarchs cannot gauge, and his plumes stretched in all the glory of his god-like freedom, his unchained liberty of life. Far beneath him, deep down among the tangled mass of heather and brown moor grasses, glistened the lean cruel steel of a barrel, like the shine of a snake's back, pointing upward, while the eagle winged his way aloft; there, in his proud kingship with the sun, how could he note or know the steel tube, scarce larger, from his altitude, than a needle's length, of his foe, hidden deep among the gorse and reeds? The sovereign bird rose higher and higher still, in stately flight. One sharp sullen report rang through the silence; a single grey puff of smoke curled up from the heather; a death-cry echoed on the air, quivering with a human agony; the eagle wheeled once round, a dizzy circle in the summer light, then dropped down through the sunny air—stricken and dead.

Was it more murder when Cæsar fell? The assassin rose from where he had knelt on one knee among the gorse, while his retriever started the wild-fowl up from the sedges of a pool, and strode through bracken and heath to the spot where his