he, bred to intellectual pleasures and high moral ideas, would have deemed a nightmare, but which, lived as it was in the atmosphere of his longing and devotion, yet held for him a strange and pungent joy: a cup of cruel memories, yet one to be lingered over luxuriously till the savour of each cherished drop of bitterness be gathered to the uttermost. Now, in the brightness of the embers, between the fitful flames of crumbling wood, spreads before his eyes the dreary strand near Quiberon, immense in the gathering darkness of a boisterous evening. Well hidden under the stone table of a Druidical men-hir glows a small camp-fire[46] sedulously kept alive by René for the service of The Lady. She, wrapped up in a coarse peasant-cloak, pensively gazes into the cheerless smoke and holds her worn and muddy boots to the smouldering wood in the vain hope of warmth. [46] And Adrian stands silently behind her, brooding on many things—on the vicissitudes of that desultory war which has left them not a roof whereunder they can lay their heads, during which the little English contingent has melted from them one by one; on the critical action of the morrow when the republican columns, now hastening to oppose the landing of the great royalist expedition to Quiberon (that supreme effort upon which all their hopes centre) must be surprised and cut off at whatever cost; on the mighty doings to follow, which are to complete the result of the recent sea fight off Ushant and crown their devoted toil with victory at last.... And through his thoughts he watches the pretty foot, in its hideous disguise of patched, worn, ill-fitting leather, and he sees it as on the first day of their meeting, in its gleaming slipper and dainty silken stocking. Now and then an owl-cry, repeated from point to point, tells of unremitting guard, but for which, in the vast silence, none could suspect that a thousand men and more are lying stretched upon the plain all around them, fireless, well-nigh without food, yet patiently waiting for the morrow when their chiefs shall lead them to death; nor that, in a closer circle, within call, are some fifty gars, remnant of the indomitable "Savenaye band," and tacitly sworn bodyguard to The Lady who came back from ease and safety over seas to share their peril. No sound besides, but the wind as it whistles and moans over the heath—and the two are together in the mist which comes closing in upon them as if to shroud them from all the rest, for even René has crept away, to
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