"Ambition, power,--gratify one, gain the other."

"Nonsense! He'll probably go abroad and travel for a while, come back,
marry, and enjoy life."

"He does that now, I fancy."

"Looks so."

And indeed he did. There was not only vigor and manly beauty, splendid
in its present, but the "possibility of more to be in the full process
of his ripening days,"--a form alert and elegant, which had not yet all
of a man's muscle and strength; a face delicate, yet strong,--refined,
yet full of latent power; a mass of rippling hair like burnished gold,
flung back on the one side, sweeping low across brow and cheek on the
other; eyes

"Of a deep, soft, lucent hue,--
Eyes too expressive to be blue,
Too lovely to be gray."

People involuntarily thought of the pink and flower of chivalry as they
looked at him, or imagined, in some indistinct fashion, that they heard
the old songs of Percy and Douglas, or the later lays of the cavaliers,
as they heard his voice,--a voice that was just now humming one of these
same lays:--

"Then mounte! then mounte, brave gallants, all,
And don your helmes amaine;