Perhaps it was
the future that was engrossing his mind, but sometimes it came to him dimly as
a strange thing how so small a matter as a slip of a girl in a page's dress
could loom so large that there was no corner of manor or tower but recalled
some trick of her tossing curls, some echo of her ringing laughter. The
platform whereon they had walked in the moonlight, facing death together, he
shunned as he would have shunned a grave; and the postern where they had
parted was haunted ground. Did he tramp across the snow-crusted fields, memory
clothed them again in nodding grain, and between the golden walls a figure in
elfin green flitted like a will o' the wisp. Did he outsit the maids and men
around his hearth and watch the dying fire with no other companions than his
sleeping dogs, fancy placed a scar-let-cloaked figure on the cushion at his
feet and raised at his knee a face of sweetest friendliness, whose flower-blue
eyes brightened or gloomed in response to his lightest mood... Once more he
heard the harp-notes that told of the wood-nymph's sorrow;... once more he
heard his laughing denunciation;... again there looked back at him the wounded
eyes... Whenever this vision rose before him, he stirred in his chair and
turned his face from the light.
"May heaven grant that she is not remembering it!" he would murmur. And for a
while he would see her as he had left her in the garden, holding herself so
bravely erect in her shining robes, her white cheeks mocking at her smiling
lips.
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