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114 "I would swear to his voice and his laugh anywhere a score of years hence; and I should know him, again, too: he was as beautiful as a woman, though I did not take his measure as I should have done had I guessed where we should meet."

"The object, of coarse^ was purely political, and there are thousands of men—Carlists, Ultramontanists, Carbonarists, Reactionists, Socialists, and all the rest of the Continentalists—who would have held that they only obeyed their chiefs, and acted like patriots in shooting you down, for the sake of your papers. Well, you shall have your own way, Erceldoune, and all you ask—it is little enough! Lady George!" broke off his lordship, vivaciously, as a party from the billiard-room entered the library, "here is Erceldoune so enamoured of the country he was murdered in, that he is asking me to have him sent off there again! These Messenger fellows are never quiet: he says he ought to be an Arab chief, and so he should be." He only wants the white haick to look like one," smiled Lady George, a lovely blonde, dropping her azure eyes on him with an effective side glance—wholly wasted.

Erceldoune, to his own infinite annoyance, had found himself an object of hero-worship to all the