g for protection and
mother-love to her elder sister Catherine. Catherine, in those two
years, had blossomed out her beauty; her sallowness and green pallor
had become bloom, though not rosy, rather an ineffable clear white
like a lily. Her eyes, at once shy and antagonistic, had become as
steady as stars in their estimation of self and others, and all her
slender height was as well in her power of graceful guidance as the
height of a young oak tree. Catherine, in those days, paid very
little heed to me, for her one year of superior age seemed then
threefold to both of us, except as she was jealously watchful that I
win not too much of the love of her little sister. I have never seen
such love from elder to younger as there was from Catherine
Cavendish to her half-sister Mary after the little one had lost her
mother. And all that the little maid did, whether of work or play,
was with an eye toward the other's approbation, especially after the
advent of her grandmother. Catherine had lovers, but she would have
none of them. It seemed as if the maternal love of which most maids
feel the unknown and unspelled yearning, and which, perchance, may
draw them all unwittingly to wedlock, had seized upon Catherine
Cavendish, and she had, as it were, fulfilled it by proxy by this
love of her young sister, and so had her heart made cold toward all
lovers. Be that as it may, though she was much sought after by more
than one of high degree, she remained as she was.

For the last part of my stay at Cambridge I saw but little of her,
and not so much as I would fain have done of her sister. I was past
the boyish liberty of lying in wait in the park for a glimpse of
her; she was not of an age for me to pay my court, and there was
little intimacy betwixt my mother and Madam Cavendish. But I can
truly say that never for one minute did I lose the consciousness of
her in the world with me, and that at a time when my love might well
be a somewhat anomalous and sexless thing, since she was grown a
little past my first conception of love toward her, and had not yet
reached my second.

But oh, the glimpses I used to catch of her at that time,
slim-legged and swift, and shrilly sweet of voice as a lark, and as
shyly a-flutter at the motion of a hand toward her, or else seated
prim as any grown maiden, with grave eyes of attention upon her task
of sampler or linen stitching!

My heart used to leap in a fashion that none would have believed nor