“But he would think of it,” she said, “all his life through and bear it on his soul.”  And she shuddered, too, and in her eyes was the old look which sometimes haunted them.  Surely, he thought, Nature had never before made a woman’s eyes so to answer to her lover’s and her lord’s.  They were so warm and full of all a man’s soul most craved for.  He had seen them flash fire like Juno’s, he had seen tears well up into them as if she had been a tender girl, he had seen them laugh like a child’s, he had seen them brood over him as a young dove’s might brood over her mate, but this look was unlike any other, and was as if she thought on some dark thing in another world—­so far away that her mind’s vision could scarce reach it, and yet could not refrain from turning towards its shadow.

But this was but a cloud which his love-words and nearness could dispel.  This she herself told him on a time when he spoke to her of it.

“When you see it,” she said, “come and tell me that you love me, and that there is naught can come between our souls.  As you said the day you showed me the dear rose, ’Naught can come between’—­and love is more than all.”

“But that you know,” he answered.

Life is so full of joys for those who love and, being mated, are given by their good fortunes the power to live as their hearts lead them.  These two were given all things, it seemed to the world which looked on.  From one of their estates to the other they went with the changing seasons, and with them carried happiness and peace.  Her Grace, of whom the villagers had heard such tales as made them feel that they should tremble before the proud glance of her dark eyes, found that their last Duchess, whose eyes had been like violets, could smile no more sweetly.  This one was somehow the more majestic lady of the two, being taller and having a higher bearing by Nature, but none among them had ever beheld one who was more a woman and seemed so well to understand a woman’s heart and ways.  Where had she learned it, they wondered among themselves, as others had wondered the year when, as my Lady Dunstanwolde, she had been guest at Camylott, and in the gipsy’s encampment had carried, so soft and tenderly, the little gipsy child in her arms.  Where had she learned it?

“Gerald,” she said once to her husband, and pressed her hand against her heart, “’twas always here—­here, lying hid, when none knew it—­when I did not know it myself.  When I seemed but a hard, wild creature, having only men for friends—­I was a woman then, and used sometimes to sit and stare at the red coals of the fire, or the red sun going down on the moors, and feel longings and pities and sadness I knew not the meaning of.  And often, suddenly, I was made angry by them and would spring up and walk away that I might be troubled no more.  But ’twas Nature crying out in me that I was a woman and could be naught else.”

Her love and tenderness for her sister, Mistress Anne, increased, it seemed, hour by hour.