golden stars. They stood and listened, hand in hand, her
sweet breast rose and fell, her lovely face was lifted to the bespangled
sky.

"Of all this," she said, "I am a part, as I am a part of you. To-night,
as the great earth throbs, and as the stars tremble, and as the wind
sighs, so I, being woman, throb and am tremulous and sigh also. The
earth lives for the sun, and through strange mysteries blooms forth each
season with fruits and flowers; love is my sun, and through its
sacredness I may bloom too, and be as noble as the earth and that it
bears."

CHAPTER XXI--An heir is born

In a fair tower whose windows looked out upon spreading woods, and rich
lovely plains stretching to the freshness of the sea, Mistress Anne had
her abode which her duchess sister had given to her for her own living in
as she would. There she dwelt and prayed and looked on the new life
which so beauteously unfolded itself before her day by day, as the leaves
of a great tree unfold from buds and become noble branches, housing birds
and their nests, shading the earth and those sheltering beneath them,
braving centuries of storms.

To this simile her simple mind oft reverted, for indeed it seemed to her
that naught more perfect and more noble in its high likeness to pure
Nature and the fulfilling of God's will than the passing days of these
two lives could be.

"As the first two lived--Adam and Eve in their garden of Eden--they seem
to me," she used to say to her own heart; "but the Tree of Knowledge was
not forbidden them, and it has taught them naught ignoble."

As she had been wont to watch her sister from behind the ivy of her
chamber windows, so she often watched her now, though there was no fear
in her hiding, only tenderness, it being a pleasure to her full of wonder
and reverence to see this beautiful and stately pair go lovingly and in
high and gentle converse side by side, up and down the terrace, through
the paths, among the beds of flowers, under the thick branched trees and
over the sward's softness.

"It is as if I saw Love's self, and dwelt with it--the love God's nature
made," she said, with gentle sighs.

For if these two had been great and beauteous before, it seemed in these
days as if life and love glowed within them, and shone through their mere
bodies as a radiant light shines through alabaster lamps. The strength
of each was so the being of the other that no thought could take form in
the brain of on