He strained her to his breast, and smothered her
face and the child's with kisses, and washed them with the rain
of his tears. I suspected. I inquired. Yes, I was right; it was
husband and wife. They had to be torn apart by force; the girl
had to be dragged away, and she struggled and fought and shrieked
like one gone mad till a turn of the road hid her from sight; and
even after that, we could still make out the fading plaint of those
receding shrieks. And the husband and father, with his wife and
child gone, never to be seen by him again in life?--well, the look
of him one might not bear at all, and so I turned away; but I knew
I should never get his picture out of my mind again, and there
it is to this day, to wring my heartstrings whenever I think of it.
We put up at the inn in a village just at nightfall, and when
I rose next morning and looked abroad, I was ware where a knight
came riding in the golden glory of the new day, and recognized him
for knight of mine--Sir Ozana le Cure Hardy. He was in the
gentlemen's furnishing line, and his missionarying specialty was
plug hats. He was clothed all in steel, in the beautifulest armor
of the time--up to where his helmet ought to have been; but he
hadn't any helmet, he wore a shiny stove-pipe hat, and was ridiculous
a spectacle as one might want to see. It was another of my
surreptitious schemes for extinguishing knighthood by making it
grotesque and absurd.
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