The second thing which stirred the young observer’s interest was the great man’s great love.  The most parsimonious and mercantile of beings, he had married a poor beauty when fair creatures with fortunes smiled upon him on every side; the most indomitable of spirits, the warrior of whom armies stood in awe, he was the willing subject of a woman whose fiery temper and tempestuous spirit the world knew as well as it knew her beauty and her dominating charm.  For some reason he could scarcely have analyzed, it gave Roxholm a strange pleasure to hear anecdotes of the passionate love-letters scrawled on the field—­on the eve of battle, the hour after a great encounter and triumph; to know that better than victory to the great conquerer, who could command the slaughter of thousands without the quiver of a muscle or a moment’s qualm, were the few lines in a woman’s hand which told him he was forgiven for some fancied wrong or missed in some tender hour.

“My Lady Sarah is a handsome creature, and ever was one,” ’twas said, “but there are those who are greater beauties, and who have less brimstone in the air about them and less lightning in their eyes.”

“But ’twas she who was his own,” Roxholm said to himself in pondering it over, “and when their eyes met each knew—­and when she is fierce and torments him ’tis as if the fire in his own blood spoke, as if his own voice reproached him—­and he remembers their dear hours together, and forgives, and woos her back to him.  If she were not his own—­if he were not hers, neither could endure it.  They would strike each other dead.  ’Tis sure nature makes one man for one woman, one woman for one man—­as it was in the garden where our first parents loved.  Few creatures find their mates, alas; but when they do ’tis Eden over again, in spite of all things—­and all else is mean and incomplete.

He did not know that, as he had observed and been attracted by the hero, so the hero had been attracted by himself, though ’twas in a lesser degree, since one man was cold and mature and the other young and warm.

My Lord Churchill had been the most beautiful youth of his time, distinguished for the elegance of his bearing and the perfection of his countenance and form.  When, at fifteen, the services of his father in the royal cause had procured for him the place of page in the household of the Duke of York, he had borne away the palm from all others of his age.  When, at sixteen, his martial instincts had led to the Prince’s obtaining for him a commission in a regiment of the guards, his first appearance in his scarlet and gold lace had produced such commotion among the court beauties as promised to lead to results almost disastrous, since he attracted attention in places too high to reach with safety.  But even then his ambitions were stronger than his temptations, and he fled the latter to go to fight the Moors.  On his return, more beautiful than ever, the lustre of success in arms added to his ripened charms, the