Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III SWEET BONDAGE OPRING that year made battle royal with cold winds. Together they fought for the mastery. Yet where they gained in strength she gained in insistence. Driven away she yet returned again and again, till at length they were weary of the fight, and fled before her to return no more. The victory hers she reigned supreme and triumphant, flung her snowy mantle over fruit trees, kissed to full awakening the flowers in copse and field, roused to chorus of warblings the birds' song in the hedges. Knowing her reign late and soon to pass to that of summer she lost no moment of it once established. The south and west winds, now her subjects, sang softly among the trees and grasses at her bidding. The sun, king of all, crowned his reigning queen. Peregrine sat in the castle garden at the foot of the white sundial which stood at the edge of the velvet grass sward. Around him were flower-beds brilliant with colour. Here were masses of small purple campanula covering the stone border between flower-bed and flagged path; clumps of anemones many-hued, named for St. Brigid; narcissi golden-eyed trembling in the soft air; forget-me-nots blue as the sky or Our Lady's robe; scillas deeper dyed; tulips chalice-shaped, gold, crimson, and white,—a very riot of colour, gay as the sweet mad call of spring. Beyond lay the park, the trees clean and fresh in their vesture of new leaves; and beyond that again the open spaces of the moorland. Peregrine, looking thereat, saw its freedom, remembered his own. A prisoner now, he laughed, yet without bitterness. Ten short weeks to change a man, yet he found himself changed. Peregrine set himself to think. Yet this he found no easy task. He could see himself as he was ten weeks agone, fancied the mentalimage as clear-cut as a... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.