CHAPTER V.
"AN IGNIS FATUUS GLEAM OF LOVE."
"It was a superb thing—magnificent!"
The most popular personage in the English Cabinet was standing on the hearth-rug of his own library of his wife's chateau of Liramar, South Italy, where he had snatched a brief autumn holiday, nothing altered and little aged since some twenty years before when the beggared Border-lord, in the pride and liberty of his youth and his ruin, had won the great Minister's liking for life, by—a defiance.
Erceldoune laughed, a little impatiently.
"Nothing of the kind! Any other man in the service would have done the same; simplest duty possible."
"Simple duties get done in this world, do they? Humph! I didn't know it. I suppose you expected, when you gave the word to fire, that the brutes would kill you—eh?"
"Of course! I can't think now how they missed
