Through the passing of two years Osmonde’s foot did not press English soil again, and his existence during that period was more vivid and changeful than it had ever been before.  He saw Ramillies follow Blenheim, great Marlborough attain the height of renown, and French Louis’s arrogant ambitions end in downfall and defeat.  Life in both camp and Court he knew at its highest tension, brilliant scenes he beheld, strange ones, wicked ones, and lived a life so eventful and full of motion and excitement that there were few men who through its picturesque adventures would have been like to hold in mind one image and one thought.  Yet this he did, telling himself that ’twas the thought which held him, not he the thought, it having been proven in the past ’twas one which would not have released him from its dominion even had he been inclined to withdraw himself from it.  And this he was not.  Nature had so built him, that on the day when he had found himself saying, “In two years’ time I will come back to Gloucestershire and see what time has wrought,” he had reached a point from which there was no retreating.  Through many an hour in time past there had been turmoil in his mind, but in a measure, at least, this ended the uncertainties, and was no rash outburst but a resolve.  It had not been made lightly, but had been like a plant which had grown from a seed, long hidden in dark earth and slowly fructifying till at last summer rain and warming sun had caused it to burst forth from its prison, a thing promising full fruit and flower.  For long he had not even known the seed was in the soil; he had felt its stirrings before he had believed in its existence, and then one day the earth had broke and he had seen its life and known what its strength might be.  ’Twould be of wondrous strength, he knew, and of wondrous beauty if no frost should blight nor storm uproot it.

In its freedom from all tendency to plaything-sentiments and trivial romances, his youth had been unlike the youth of other men.  Being man and young, he had known temptation, but had disdained it; being also proud and perhaps haughty in his fastidiousness, and being strong, he had thrust base and light things aside.  He had held in his brain a fancy from his boyhood, and singularly enough it had but grown stronger and become more fully formed with his own strength and increase of years.  ’Twas a strange fancy indeed to fit the time he lived in, but ’twas his choice.  The woman whose eyes held the answer to the question his own soul asked, and whose being asked the question to which his own replied, would bring great and deep joy to him—­others did not count in his existence—­and for her he had waited and longed, sometimes so fiercely, that he wondered if he was in the wrong and but following a haunting, mocking dream.

“You are an epicure, Osmonde,” his Grace of Marlborough said more than once, for he had watched and studied him closely.  “Not an anchorite but an epicure.”