They recognised each other. Ian looked his nephew up and down with a
cool kind of insolence as he passed, but did not make any salutation.
Gaston went straight to the castle. He asked for his uncle, and was told
that he had gone to Lady Belward. He wandered to the library: it was
empty. He lit a cigar, took down a copy of Matthew Arnold's poems,
opening at "Sohrab and Rustum," read it with a quick-beating heart, and
then came to "Tristram and Iseult." He knew little of "that Arthur" and
his knights of the Round Table, and Iseult of Brittany was a new figure
of romance to him. In Tennyson, he had got no further than "Locksley
Hall," which, he said, had a right tune and wrong words; and "Maud,"
which "was big in pathos." The story and the metre of "Tristram and
Iseult" beat in his veins. He got to his feet, and, standing before the
window, repeated a verse aloud:

"Cheer, cheer thy dogs into the brake,
O hunter! and without a fear
Thy golden-tassell'd bugle blow,
And through the glades thy pasture take
For thou wilt rouse no sleepers here!
For these thou seest are unmoved;
Cold, cold as those who lived and loved
A thousand years ago."

He was so engrossed that he did not hear the door open. He again
repeated the lines with the affectionate modulation of a musician. He
knew that they were right. They were hot with life--a life that was no
more a part of this peaceful landscape than a palm-tree would be. He
felt that he ought to read the poem in a desert, out by the Polar Sea,
down on the Amazon, yonder at Nukualofa; that it would fit in with
bearding the Spaniards two hundred years ago. Bearding the Spaniards--