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Rh than to her lips; and he thought that she must hear the beating of his heart—it had never throbbed so thick and fast when he had given the word for his own death-shot in the Carpathian pass. He had never felt himself stricken strengthless and powerless, blind and dizzy with a thousand new emotions, as he felt now:—so had another bold Border chief, the Night Rider of the Marches, been conquered when Bothwell stood before his Queen.

His thoughts were full of fever, his life seemed confused yet transfigured. To have thrown himself at her feet and gazed there upward to her in silence and in worship, would have been to follow the impulse in him. She knew it; his eyes spoke all on which his lips were perforce dumb; he did not think how much they betrayed him, he did not dream how much they told—to a woman who had wakened so much love that its faintest sign was known to her—of the tumult in. his heart, of the glory in his life, of the madness in his soul, which were so mingled and so nameless to himself. In that moment, the whole heart of the man, in its brave truthfulness, its bold manhood, its head-long faith, and its awakening passions, was open