d Manvers, a young
English gentleman of easy fortune, independent habits and analytical
disposition; also riding, also singing to himself, equally early
afoot, but in very different circumstances. He bestrode a horse
tolerably sound, had a haversack before him reasonably stored. He had
a clean shirt on him, and another embaled, a brace of pistols, a New
Testament and a "Don Quixote"; he wore brown knee-boots, a tweed
jacket, white duck breeches, and a straw hat as little picturesque as
it was comfortable or convenient. Neither revenge nor enemy lay ahead,
of him; he travelled for his pleasure, and so pleasantly that even Time
was his friend. Health was the salt of his daily fare, and curiosity
gave him appetite for every minute of the day.

He would have looked incongruous in the elfin landscape--in that empty
plain, under that ringing sky--if he had not appeared to be as
extremely at home in it as young Esteban himself; but there was this
farther difference to be noted, that whereas Esteban seemed to belong
to the land, the land seemed to belong to Mr. Manvers--the land of the
Spains and all those vast distances of it, the enormous space of
ground, the dim blue mountains at the edge, the great arch of sky over
all. He might have been a young squire at home, overlooking his farms,
one eye for the tillage or the upkeep of fence and hedge, another for a
covey, or a hare in a farrow. He was as serene as Esteban and as
contented; but his comfort lay in easy possession, not in being easily
possessed. Occasionally he whistled as he rode, but, like Esteban,
broke now and again into a singing voice, more cheerful, I think, than
melodious.

"If she be not fair for me,
What care I how fair she be?"

An old song. But Henry Chorley made a tone for it the summer before
Mr. Manvers left England, and it had caught his fancy, both the air and
the sentiment. They had come aptly to suit his scoffing mood, and to
help him salve the wound which a Miss Eleanor Vernon had dealt his
heart--a Miss Eleanor Vernon with her clear disdainful eyes. She had
given him his first acquaintance with the hot-and-cold disease.

"If she be not fair for me!" Well, she was not to be that. Let her go
spin then, and--"What care I how fair she be?" He had discarded her
with the Dover cliffs, and resumed possession of himself and his seeing
eye. By this time a course of desultory journeying through Brittany
and the West of France, a wint