We still felt the upland,
however, as a loftier air; and always as, when night comes, nature
exercises some mysterious magic of the dark hour in strange places,
there, as all day long, we seemed to draw closer to earth--not earth as
it is in landscape, a thing of beauty and colour and human kinship, but
earth, the soil, the element, the globe.
This was in both our minds, and I had thought of it before he spoke
after a long pause over the briar pipes that had comraded our talk since
morning. "I can't talk of it now," he said; "it's gone into me in an
hour that you have been years in thinking; but that is what you are to
us." I say the things he said, for I cannot otherwise give his way, and
that trust of love in which these thoughts were born on my lips; all
those years, in many a distant place, I had thought for him almost as
much as for myself. "You knighted us," he said, "and we fight your
cause,"--not knowing that kingship, however great or humble, is but the
lowly knights made one in him who by God's grace can speak the word. "I
have no doubt it's true, what you say; but it is different.
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