But here the fragile “Willow Wand” shrieked and fell into her first fit, not having strength to support herself under the prospect of hearing the story again with further and more special detail.

“I hear too much of her,” Roxholm said to himself at last.  “She is in the air a man breathes, and seems to get into his veins and fly to his brain.”  He suddenly laughed a short laugh, which even to himself had a harsh sound. “’Tis time I should go back to Flanders,” he said, “and rejoin his Grace of Marlborough.”

He had been striding over the hillsides all morning with his gun over his shoulder, and had just before he spoke thrown himself down to rest.  He had gone out alone, his mood pleasing itself best with solitude, and had lost his way and found himself crossing strange land.  Being wearied and somewhat out of sorts, he had flung himself down among the heather and bracken, where he was well out of sight, and could lie and look up at the gray of the sky, his hands clasped beneath his head.

“Yes, ’twill be as well that I go back to Flanders,” he said again, somewhat gloomily; and as he spoke he heard voices on the fall of the hill below him, and glancing down through the gorse bushes, saw approaching his resting-place four sportsmen who looked as fatigued as himself.

He did not choose to move, thinking they would pass him, and as they came nearer he recognised them one by one, having by this time been long enough in the neighbourhood to have learned both names and faces.  They were of the Wildairs crew, and one man’s face enlightened him as to whose estate he trespassed upon, the owner of the countenance being a certain Sir Christopher Crowell, a jolly drunken dog whose land he had heard was somewhere in the neighbourhood.  The other two men were a Lord Eldershawe and Sir Jeoffry Wildairs himself, while the tall stripling with them ’twas easy to give a name to, though she strode over the heather with her gun on her shoulder and as full a game-bag as if she had been a man—­it being Mistress Clorinda, in corduroy and with her looped hair threatening to break loose and hanging in disorder about her glowing face.  They were plainly in gay humour, though wearied, and talked and laughed noisily as they came.

“We have tramped enough,” cried Sir Jeoffry, “and bagged birds enough for one morning.  ’Tis time we rested our bones and put meat and drink in our bellies.”

He flung himself down upon the heather and the other men followed his example.  Mistress Clo, however, remaining standing, at first leaning upon her gun.

My lord Marquess gazed down at her from his ledge and shut his teeth in anger at the mounting of the blood to his cheek and its unseemly burning there.

“I will stay where I am and look at her, at least,” he said.  “To be looked at does no woman harm, and to look at one can harm no man—­if he be going to Flanders.”