er, travelled not for pleasure but
to get over the leagues. For him this country of distances and great
air was not Castile, but Broceliande; a land of enchantments and pain.
He was no longer fancy-free, but bound to a quest.

Consider the issues of this day of his. From bathing in pastoral he
had been suddenly soused into tragedy's seething-pot. His idyll of the
tanned gipsy, with her glancing eyes and warm lips, had been spattered
out with a brushful of blood; the scene was changed from sunny life to
wan death. Here were the staring eyes of a dead man, and his mouth
twisted awry in its last agony. He could not away with the shock, nor
divest himself of a share in it. If he, by mischance, had taken up
with Manuela, he had taken up with Esteban too.

The vanished players in the drama loomed in his mind larger for that
fateful last act. The tragic sock and the mask enhanced them. What
mystery lay behind Manuela's sidelong eyes? What sin or suffering?
What knowledge, how gained, justified Esteban's wizened saws? These
two were wise before their time; when they ought to have been flirting
on the brink of life, here they were, breasting the great flood,
familiar with death, hating and stabbing!

A pretty child with a knife in her hand; and a boy murdered--what a
country! And where stood he, Manvers, the squire of Somerset, with his
thirty years, his University education and his seat on the bench?
Exactly level with the curate, to be counted on for an archery meeting!
Well enough for diversion; but when serious affairs were on hand, sent
out of the way. Was it not so, that he, as the child of the party, was
dismissed to bathe while his elders fought out their deadly quarrel? I
put it in the interrogative; but he himself smarted under the answer to
it, and although he never formulated the thought, and made no plans,
and could make none, I have no doubt but that his wounded self-esteem,
seeking a salve, found it in the assurance that he would protect
Manuela from the consequences of her desperate act; that his protection
was his duty and her need. The English mind works that way; we cannot
endure a breath upon our fair surface. We must direct the operations
of this world, or the devil's in it.

Manvers was not, of course, in love with Manuela. He was sentimentally
engaged in her affairs, and very sure that they were, and must be, his
own. Yet I don't know whether the waking dream which he had upon the
summ