I thought him a little mad, but yet his speech had seemed not without dark meaning.

"Thee has had a visitor," I said to him presently.

He laughed in a snarling way that made me shrink, and answered: "He wanted this and he wanted that--his high-handed, second-best lordship.

Ay, and he would have it, because it pleased him to have it--like his father before him.

A poor sparrow on a tree-top, if you tell him he must not have it, he will hunt it down the world till it is his, as though it was a bird of paradise.