“Give me my ring,” gasped he.

An imprecation of a sufficiently emphatic character was the only reply.  The Bohemian got one hand loose, and Hugh heard a sound like the breaking of glass.  Before he could gain any advantage —­ for his antagonist seemed for the moment to have concentrated all his force in the other hand —­ a wet handkerchief was held firmly to his face.  His fierceness died away; he was lapt in the vapour of dreams; and his senses departed.

CHAPTER XXIX.

Hugh’s awaking.

But ah! believe me, there is more than so,
That works such wonders in the minds of men;
I, that have often proved, too well it know;
And whoso list the like assays to ken,
Shall find by trial, and confess it then,
That beauty is not, as fond men misdeem,
An outward show of things that only seem!

But ye, fair dames, the world’s dear ornaments,
And lively images of heaven’s light,
Let not your beams with such disparagements
Be dimmed, and your bright glory darkened quite;
But, mindful still of your first country’s sight,
Do still preserve your first informed grace,
Whose shadow yet shines in your beauteous face.

Spenser. —­ Hymn in Honour of Beauty.

When Hugh came to himself, he was lying, in the first grey of the dawn, amidst the dews and vapours of the morning woods.  He rose and looked around him.  The Ghost’s Walk lay in long silence before him.  Here and there a little bird moved and peeped.  The glory of a new day was climbing up the eastern coast of heaven.  It would be a day of late summer, crowned with flame, and throbbing with ripening life.  But for him the spirit was gone out of the world, and it was nought but a mass of blind, heartless forces.

Possibly, had he overheard the conversation, the motions only of which he had overseen the preceding night, he would, although equally perplexed, have thought more gently of Euphra; but, in the mood into which even then he must have been thrown, his deeper feelings towards her could hardly have been different from what they were now.  Although he had often felt that Euphra was not very good, not a suspicion had crossed his mind as to what he would have called the purity of her nature.  Like many youths, even of character inferior to his own, he had the loftiest notions of feminine grace, and unspottedness in thought and feeling, not to say action and aim.  Now he found that he had loved a woman who would creep from her chamber, at the cost of great suffering, and almost at the risk of her life, to meet, in the night and the woods, a man no better than an assassin —­ probably a thief.  Had he been more versed in the ways of women, or in the probabilities of things, he would have judged that the very extravagance of the action demanded a deeper explanation than what seemed to lie on the surface.  Yet, although he judged Euphra very hardly upon those grounds, would he have judged her differently had he actually known all?  About this I am left to conjecture alone.