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