naturally calculated, as far as their wild spirits calculated at all,
on the same effects from the same causes. But the circumstances
of the preceding day had made an essential alteration in the case.
The baron knew well, from the intelligence he had received,
that the earl's offence was past remission: which would
have been of less moment but for the awful fact of his castle
being in the possession of the king's forces, and in those days
possession was considerably more than eleven points of the law.
The baron was therefore convinced that the earl's outlawry
was infallible, and that Matilda must either renounce
her lover, or become with him an outlaw and a fugitive.
In proportion, therefore, to the baron's knowledge of the strength
and duration of her attachment, was his fear of the difficulty
of its ever being overcome: her love of the forest and the chase,
which he had never before discouraged, now presented itself
to him as matter of serious alarm; and if her cheerfulness
gave him hope on the one hand by indicating a spirit superior
to all disappointments, it was suspicious to him on the other,
as arising from some latent certainty of being soon united
to the earl. All these circumstances concurred to render
their songs of the vanished deer and greenwood archery and
Yoicks and Harkaway, extremely mal-a-propos, and to make
his anger boil and bubble in the cauldron of his spirit,
till its more than ordinary excitement burst forth with sudden
impulse into active manifestation.

[1] Roasting by a slow fire for the love of God.


But as it sometimes happens, from the might