stand quite near without observing her. Feeling
that she had no testimony to her fancifulness, she found herself thinking
in a vague fashion that he, too, had come there because he chose to be
unobserved. 'Twould not have been so easy for him to retire as it had
been for her smallness and insignificance to do so; and, indeed, she did
not fancy that he meant to conceal himself, but merely to stand for a
quiet moment a little apart from the crowd.

And as she looked up at him, wondering why this should be, she saw he was
the noblest and most stately gentleman she had ever beheld.

She had never seen him before; he must either be a stranger or a rare
visitor. As Clorinda was beyond a woman's height, he was beyond a man's.

He carried himself as kingly as she did nobly; he had a countenance of
strong, manly beauty, and a deep tawny eye, thick-fringed and full of
fire; orders glittered upon his breast, and he wore a fair periwig, which
became him wondrously, and seemed to make his eye more deep and burning
by its contrast.

Beside his strength and majesty of bearing the stripling beauty of John
Oxon would have seemed slight and paltry, a thing for flippant women to
trifle with.

Mistress Anne looked at him with an admiration somewhat like reverence,
and as she did so a sudden thought rose to her mind, and even as it rose,
she marked what his gaze rested on, and how it dwelt upon it, and knew
that he had stepped apart to stand and gaze as she did--only with a man's
hid fervour--at her sister's self.

'Twas as if suddenly a strange secret had been told her. She read it in
his face, because he thought himself unobserved, and for a space had cast
his mask aside. He stood and gazed as a man who, starving at soul, fed
himself through his eyes, having no hope of other sustenance, or as a man
weary with long carrying of a burden, for a space laid it down for rest
and to gather power to go on. She heard him draw a deep sigh almost
stifled in its birth, and there was that in his face which she felt it
was unseemly that a stranger like herself should behold, himself
unknowing of her near presence.

She gently rose from her corner, wondering if she could retire from her
retreat without attracting his observation; but as she did so, chance
caused him to withdraw himself a little farther within the shadow of the
screen, and doing so, he beheld her.

Then his face changed; the mask of noble calmness, for a moment fallen,
re