zing at the ashes on the hearth. She was
pale also.

"Sister," she said, "do you--"

"Yes," answered my lady. "'Tis a man who loved me, a cur and a knave. He
thought for an hour he was cured of his passion. I could have told him
'twould spring up and burn more fierce than ever when he saw another man
possess me. 'Tis so with knaves and curs; and 'tis so with him. He hath
gone mad again."

"Ay, mad!" cried Anne--"mad, and base, and wicked!"

Clorinda gazed at the ashes, her lips curling.

"He was ever base," she said--"as he was at first, so he is now. 'Tis
thy favourite, Anne," lightly, and she delicately spurned the blackened
tinder with her foot--"thy favourite, John Oxon."

Mistress Anne crouched in her seat and hid her face in her thin hands.

"Oh, my lady!" she cried, not feeling that she could say "sister," "if he
be base, and ever was so, pity him, pity him! The base need pity more
than all."

For she had loved him madly, all unknowing her own passion, not presuming
even to look up in his beautiful face, thinking of him only as the slave
of her sister, and in dead secrecy knowing strange things--strange
things! And when she had seen the letter she had known the handwriting,
and the beating of her simple heart had well-nigh strangled her--for she
had seen words writ by him before.

* * * * *

When Dunstanwolde and his lady went back to their house in town, Mistress
Anne went with them. Clorinda willed that it should be so. She made her
there as peaceful and retired a nest of her own as she had given to her
at Dunstanwolde. By strange good fortune Barbara had been wedded to a
plain gentleman, who, being a widower with children, needed a help-meet
in his modest household, and through a distant relationship to Mistress
Wimpole, encountered her charge, and saw in her meekness of spirit the
thing which might fall into the supplying of his needs. A beauty or a
fine lady would not have suited him; he wanted but a housewife and a
mother for his orphaned children, and this, a young woman who had lived
straitly, and been forced to many contrivances for mere decency of
apparel and ordinary comfort, might be trained to become.

So it fell that Mistress Anne could go to London without pangs of
conscience at leaving her sister in the country and alone. The
stateliness of the town mansion, my Lady Dunstanwolde's retinue of
lacqueys and serving-women, her little black page, who waited on her and
took h