the worn man with his secret sorrow, and the boy with his frank, glad laugh, are passing away, side by side, over the turf, with its starry and golden wild-flowers, under the boughs in yon Druid copse, from which they start the ringdove—farther and farther, still side by side, now out of sight, as if the dense green of the summer had closed around them like waves. But still the flute sounds on, and still they hear it, softer and softer, as they go. Hark! do you not hear it—you?
CHAPTER XIV.
They came out of the little park into a by-lane; a vast tract of common land, yellow with furze, and undulated with swell and hollow spreading in front; to their right the dark beechwoods, still beneath the weight of the July noon. Lionel had been talking about the Faerie Queen, knight-errantry, the sweet, impossible dream-life that, safe from Time, glides by bower and hall, through magic forests and by witching caves, in the world of poet-books. And Darrell listened, and the flute-notes mingled with the atmosphere faint and far off, like voices from that world itself.
Out then they came, this broad waste land between them; and Lionel said, merrily:
"But this is the very scene! Here the young knight, leaving his father's hall, would have checked his destrier, glancing wistfully now over that green wild which seems so boundless, now to the 'umbrageous horror' of those breathless woodlands, and questioned himself which way to take for adventure."
"Yes," said Darrell, coming out from his long reserve on all that concerned his past life—"Yes, and the gold of the gorse-blossoms tempted me; and I took the waste land." He paused a moment, and renewed: "And then, when I had known cities and men, and snatched romance from dull matter-of-fact, then I would have done as civilization does with romance itself—I would have inclosed the waste land for my own aggrandizement. Look," he continued, with a sweep of the hand round the width
