“I love my Lord Dunstanwolde as well as any other man, and better than some, for I do not hate him.  Since I have been promised to him”—­(’twas this which now came back to her)—­“I own I have for a moment met another gentleman who might—­’twas but for a moment, and ’tis done with.”

And this—­this had been he, his Grace the Duke of Osmonde—­who was so fit a mate for her, and whose brown eyes so burned with love.  And she was a free woman, and there they stood at the open window among the flowers—­both bound, both free!

Free!  She started a little as she said the word in thought again, for she knew a strange wild story none other than herself knew, and her sister, and Sir John Oxon, and they did not suspect she shared their secret.  And for long it had seemed to her only some cruel thing she had dreamed; and the wild lovely creature she had watched and stood guard over with such trembling, during a brief season of bewildered anguish, seemed to be a sort of vision also.  At the end of but a few short months Mistress Anne had felt this lawless, beauteous being had left the splendid body she had inhabited, and another woman’s life had begun in it—­another woman’s.  That woman it was who had wed Lord Dunstanwolde and made him a blissful man, that woman had been since then her sister, her protector, and her friend; ’twas she who had watched by my lord’s body, and spoke low words to him, and stroked his poor dead hand; ’twas she who laid his wife’s hair and her child’s, and the little picture, on his still breast; ’twas she who sate by the widowed girl at Wildairs—­and ’twas she, she made glorious by love, who stood and smiled among the window’s daffodils.

His Grace and her ladyship were speaking softly together of the flowers, the sunshine, of the town and Court, and of beauteous Camylott.  Once my lord Duke’s laugh rang out, rich and gay like a boy’s, and there was such youth and fire and happiness in his handsome face as made Mistress Anne remember that, as it was with my lady, so it was with him—­that because he was so tall and great and stately, the world forgot that he was young.

“But,” said the loving woman to herself with a sudden fear, “if he should come back.  Nothing so cruel could happen—­’tis past and dead and forgiven.  He could not—­could not come.”

Then his Grace went away.  My lady spoke sweet and gracious words to him with the laughing, shining eyes of Clo Wildairs at her most wondrous hours, and the Duke holding her hand, bent and kissed it with the tender passion of a hungered man, as he had not dared to dream of kissing it before.

And he went down the staircase a new man, carrying his head as though a crown had been set on it and he would bear it nobly.  In his tawny eye there was a smile which was yet solemn though it was deeply bright.

“’Tis the beginning of the world,” he said inwardly—­“’And the evening and the morning were the first day.’  I have looked into her eyes.”