on. A vast epicurean, a consummate egotist, ripe with feeling
and rich with energy, he could not believe that when he spoke the
heavens would not fall. The stinging sweetness of the morning was a
tonic to all his energies, an elation to his mind; he swaggered through
the lush grasses and boskage as though marching to a marriage.

Leicester, on his part, no more caught at the meaning of the morning, at
the long whisper of enlivened nature, than did his foe. The day gave to
him no more than was his right. If the day was not fine, then Leicester
was injured; but if the day was fine, then Leicester had his due. Moral
blindness made him blind for the million deep teachings trembling
round him. He felt only the garish and the splendid. So it was that at
Kenilworth, where his Queen had visited him, the fetes that he had held
would far outshine the fete which would take place in Greenwich Park on
this May Day. The fete of this May Day would take place, but would he
see it? The thought flashed through his mind that he might not; but he
trod it under foot; not through an inborn, primitive egotism like that
of Lempriere, but through an innate arrogance, an unalterable belief
that Fate was ever on his side. He had played so many tricks with Fate,
had mocked while taking its gifts so often, that, like the son who has
flouted his indulgent father through innumerable times, he conceived
that he should never be disinherited. It irked him that he should be
fighting with a farmer, as he termed the Seigneur of the Jersey Isle;
but there was in the event, too, a sense of relief, for he had a will
for murder. Yesterday's events were still fresh in his mind; and he had
a feeling that the letting of Lempriere's blood would cool his own and
be some cure for the choler which the presence of these strangers at the
Court had wrought in him.

There were better swordsmen in England than he, but his skill was
various, and he knew tricks of the trade which this primitive Norman
could never have learnt. He had some touch of wit, some biting
observation, and, as he neared the place of the encounter, he played
upon the coming event with a mordant frivolity. Not by nature a brave
man, he was so much a fatalist, such a worshipper of his star, that
he had acquired an artificial courage which had served him well. The
unschooled gentlemen with him roared with laughter at his sallies, and
they came to the place of meeting as though to a summer feast.

"Good