Consolation was all that Sabina could give. It was too late to act.
Stangrave was gone, and week after week rolled by without a line from
the wanderer.
CHAPTER X.
THE RECOGNITION.
Elsley Vavasour is sitting one morning in his study, every comfort
of which is of Lucia's arrangement and invention, beating the
home-preserve of his brains for pretty thoughts. On he struggles
through that wild, and too luxuriant cover; now brought up by a
"lawyer," now stumbling over a root, now bogged in a green spring, now
flushing a stray covey of birds of Paradise, now a sphinx, chimsera,
strix, lamia, fire-drake, flying-donkey, two-headed eagle (Austrian,
as will appear shortly), or other portent only to be seen now-a-days
in the recesses of that enchanted forest, the convolutions of a poet's
brain. Up they whir and rattle, making, like most game, more noise
than they are worth. Some get back, some dodge among the trees; the
fair shots are few and far between: but Elsley blazes away right and
left with trusty quill; and, to do him justice, seldom misses his aim,
for practice has made him a sure and quick marksman in his own line.
Moreover, all is game which gets up to-day; for he is shooting for the
kitchen, or rather for the London market, as many a noble sportsman
does now-a-days, and thinks no shame. His new volume of poems ("The
Wreck" included) is in the press: but behold, it is not as long as the
publisher thinks fit, and Messrs.
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