done before her widowhood, and Anne knew whence this custom came.  There were times when, by use of her presence, she could avoid those she wished to thrust aside, and Anne noted, with a cold sinking of the spirit, that the one she would plan to elude most frequently was Sir John Oxon; and this was not done easily.  The young man’s gay lightness of demeanour had changed.  The few years that had passed since he had come to pay his courts to the young beauty in male attire, had brought experiences to him which had been bitter enough.  He had squandered his fortune, and failed to reinstate himself by marriage; his dissipations had told upon him, and he had lost his spirit and good-humour; his mocking wit had gained a bitterness; his gallantry had no longer the gaiety of youth.  And the woman he had loved for an hour with youthful passion, and had dared to dream of casting aside in boyish insolence, had risen like a phoenix, and soared high and triumphant to the very sun itself.  “He was ever base,” Clorinda had said.  “As he was at first he is now,” and in the saying there was truth.  If she had been helpless and heartbroken, and had pined for him, he would have treated her as a victim, and disdained her humiliation and grief; magnificent, powerful, rich, in fullest beauty, and disdaining himself, she filled him with a mad passion of love which was strangely mixed with hatred and cruelty.  To see her surrounded by her worshippers, courted by the Court itself, all eyes drawn towards her as she moved, all hearts laid at her feet, was torture to him.  In such cases as his and hers, it was the woman who should sue for love’s return, and watch the averted face, longing for the moment when it would deign to turn and she could catch the cold eye and plead piteously with her own.  This he had seen; this, men like himself, but older, had taught him with vicious art; but here was a woman who had scorned him at the hour which should have been the moment of his greatest powerfulness, who had mocked at and lashed him in the face with the high derision of a creature above law, and who never for one instant had bent her neck to the yoke which women must bear.  She had laughed it to scorn—­and him—­and all things—­and gone on her way, crowned with her scarlet roses, to wealth, and rank, and power, and adulation; while he—­the man, whose right it was to be transgressor—­had fallen upon hard fortune, and was losing step by step all she had won.  In his way he loved her madly—­as he had loved her before, and as he would have loved any woman who embodied triumph and beauty; and burning with desire for both, and with jealous rage of all, he swore he would not be outdone, befooled, cast aside, and trampled on.