had he lived, might have been as myself--had died with her."

Whereupon Mistress Anne, with innocent tears and lowered voice, told
him a story of how the night before her lord had been laid to rest, his
widow had sat by his side through the slow hours, and had stroked his
cold hands and spoken softly to him as if he could feel her lovingness,
and on the morning before he left her, she had folded in his clasp a
miniature of his young dead wife and a lock of her soft hair and her
child's.

"And 'twas, indeed, a tender, strange thing to see and hear," said
Anne, "for she said with such noble gentleness, that 'twas the first
sweet lady who had been his wife--not herself--and that when she and
her child should run to meet him in heaven he would forget that they
had ever parted--and all would be well. Think you it will be so, your
Grace?" her simple, filled eyes lifted to him appealingly.

"There is no marrying or giving in marriage, 'tis said," answered his
Grace, "and she whom he loved first--in his youth--surely----"

Mistress Anne's eyes dwelt upon him in quiet wondering.

"'Tis strange how your Grace and her ladyship sometimes utter the same
thoughts, as if you were but one mind," she said. "'No marrying or
giving in marriage,' 'twas that she herself said."

Dunstan's Wolde passed into the hands of the next heir, and the
countess and her sister went to their father's estate of Wildairs in
Gloucestershire, where, during the mourning, they lived in deep
seclusion. 'Twas a long mourning, to the wonder of the neighbourhood,
who, being accustomed to look upon this young lady as likely to furnish
them forth with excitement, had begun at once to make plans for her
future and decide what she would do next. Having been rid of her old
husband and left an earl's widow with a fine fortune, a town house, and
some of the most magnificent jewels in England, 'twas not likely she
would long bury herself in an old country house, hiding her beauty in
weeds and sad-coloured draperies. She would make her period of
seclusion as brief as decency would permit, and after it reappear in a
blaze of brilliancy.

But she remained at Wildairs with her sister, Mistress Anne, only being
seen on occasions at church, in her long and heavy draperies of black.

"But she is a strange mixture," said my Lord Twemlow's Chaplain, in
speaking of her, "and though she hath so changed, hath scarce changed
at all. Her black eye can flame as bright as ever un