may here (when Crompton was an abbey) have given double absolution, to himself and to the girl who confessed to him her love.  Roundhead maiden and Cavalier gallant must many a time have forgotten their political differences beneath this oak, as yet a tree not sacred to royalty; nay, perhaps even those of.  York and Lancaster may here have been compounded for, in one red rose of a blush.  Bluff Harry had haply hunted beneath its once wide-spreading arms, and certainly the martyr king had done so, with a score of generations of men of all sorts, dead and gone, God alone knows whither.  Though no more the bugle sounded, nor the twanging bow was heard, there was surely an echo of their far-away music in the young painter’s ear!  No, there was none.

     Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter,

was a line Richard Yorke had read, perhaps, but certainly had not understood.  He heard the bare branch creak and sway above his head as the wind slowly took it; he heard the night-jar croak, as it flew by on silent wing; and now and then he heard, or thought he heard, the sound of the voices of his fellow-watchers a great way off, which was his only touch of fancy.  They were all silent, and in close hiding.

It is not to be supposed, however, that his mind was fixed upon the matter in which he was engaged, so that other subjects were thereby excluded from it.  The repression of night-poaching was not a matter that interested him either in principle or practice.  He would just as soon that the keeper had not reminded him of his offer to share his watch—­the whim that had once seized him to do so had died away; but having once promised his company, he was not one to break his word.  So here he was.

The young man’s thoughts were busy, then, neither with the past nor the present, but with the future—­that is, his own future.  The path of life did not lie straight before Richard Yorke, as it does before most men of his age, and in fact it came, so to speak, abruptly to a termination exactly where he stood.

In such a case, the choice of the wayfarer becomes boundless, and is only limited by the horizon and circumstances.  As matters were, he had scarcely enough to live on—­not nearly enough to do so as his tastes and habits suggested; and yet, by one bold stroke, with luck to back it, he might, not “one day” (that would have had small charm for him), but at once, and for his life-long, be rich and prosperous.  He could not be said to have expectations, but his position was not without certain contingencies, the extreme brilliancy of which might almost atone for their vagueness.  It was from a dream of future greatness, or what seemed to him as such, wherein he saw himself wealthy and powerful, surrounded with luxury and with the ministers of every pleasure, that he was suddenly and sharply awakened by a trifling incident—­the snapping of a dead twig in the copse hard by.  In an instant