“They are a strange pair, those two fine creatures,” said the old Dowager Storms one day to her favourite crony, an elderly matron to whom she could safely talk gossip.  “But look at them.” (They were with the whole party at racquets in the court, and my lord Duke, having made a splendid stroke, glowing and laughing bowed in response to a round of applause.) “Is there a husband at Court—­though he were not thirty-five—­who has reason to feel as safe as the old Earl Dunstanwolde may—­when his wife is guest to such a pretty fellow as he?” nodding her head towards his Grace.  “Never in my days saw I a thing so out of nature!  ’Tis as though they were not flesh and blood, but—­but of some stuff we are not made of.  ’Tis but human he should make sly love to her, and her eyes wander after him despite herself wheresoever he goes.  All know how a woman’s eyes will follow a man, and his hers, but when these look at each other ’tis steadfast honesty that looks out of them—­and ’tis scarce to be understood.”

CHAPTER XXI

Upon the Moor

Throughout the festivities which followed each other, day by day, my Lady Dunstanwolde was queen of every revel.  ’Twas she who led the adventurous party who visited the gipsy encampment in the glen by moonlight, and so won the heart of the old gipsy queen that she took her to her tent and instructed her in the mysteries of spells and potions.  She walked among them as though she had been bred and born one of their tribe, and came forth from one tent carrying in her arms a brown infant, and showed it to the company, laughing like a girl and making pretty sounds at the child when it stared at her with great black eyes like her own, and shook at it all her rings, which she stripped from her fingers, holding them in the closed palm of her hand to make a rattle of.  She stirred the stew hanging to cook over the camp-fire, and begged a plate of it for each of the company, and ate her own with such gay appetite as recalled to Osmonde the day he had watched her on the moor; and the gipsy women stood by showing their white teeth in their pleasure, and the gipsy men hung about with black shining eyes fixed on her in stealthy admiration.  She stood by the fire in the light of the flame, having fantastically wound a scarlet scarf about her head, and ’twas as though she might have been a gipsy queen herself.

“And indeed,” she said, as they rode home, “I have often enough thought I should like to be one of them; and when I was a child, and was in a passion, more than once planned to stain my face and run away to the nearest camp I could come upon.  Indeed, I think I was always a rebel and loved wild, lawless ways.”