cowardly foes, for the hour of reckoning when he should rise and deal with that cravon womanish brute, whose gentle mellow laugh had bidden them "kill the Border Eagle," and whose shot had brought him to the earth.
A fair and open antagonist Erceldoune would honour, and forgive frankly and generously from his heart; but to the coward treachery that struck him in the dark, he swore that death itself should not be more pitiless or more inexorable than his wrath.
The shadows lengthened through the painted window, the music ceased from the convent chapel, the nun left him, and knelt before the altar lost in prayer; it was intensely still, no sound was upon the air save that from the distance the bells of one of the Moldavian monasteries were chiming the vespers—it was a pause as strange in his strong, rapid, varied, richly-coloured life of action and adventure as that which we feel when we enter the shaded silent aisles of some cathedral, and the doors close behind us, shutting out all the accustomed crowds, the busy whirl, and the swift press, and the hot sunlight of the city we have left without. He had never known in all the years of his existence that profound exhaustion, that death-like
