scene with a groan, then presently for very mirthlessness, laughed.

"That day," he said to himself with a grimace--"that day when we forsook
our hawking, and dismounting on this knoll, planned for him his new
house! There should be the front, there the tower, there the great room
where the Queen should lie when she made progress through these ways!
All to be built when, like a tiercel-gentle to his wrist, came more
fame, more gold!"

The speaker turned in his saddle and looked about him with a rueful
smile.

"I on yonder mossy stone, and Sidney, chin in hand, full length beneath
that oak, and he standing there, his arm about the neck of his gray! And
what says monsieur the traitor? 'I like it well as it stands, nor will I
tear down what my forefathers built. Plain honor and plain truth are the
walls thereof, and encompassed by them, the Queen's Grace may lie down
with pride.' Brave words, traitor! Gulls, gulls (saith the world),
friend Sidney! For a modicum of thy judgment, Solomon, King of Jewry, I
would give (an he would bestow it upon me) my cousin the Earl's
great ruby!"

He laughed again, then sighed, and gathering up his reins, left the
little eminence and trotted on through sun and shade to a vacant,
ruinous lodge and a twilit avenue, silent and sad beneath the heavy
interlacing of leafy boughs. Closing the vista rose a squat doorway,
ivy-hung; and tumbled upon the grass beside it, attacking now a great
book and now a russet pippin, lay a lad in a blue jerkin.

At the sound of the horse's hoofs the reader marked his page with his