“We are but one,” she said; “one breath, one soul, one thought, and one desire.  Were it not so, I were not woman and your wife, nor you man and my soul’s lover as you are.  If it were not so, we were still apart, though we were wedded a thousand times.  Apart, what are we but like lopped-off limbs; welded together, we are—­this.”  And for a moment they spoke not, and a nightingale on the rose vine, clambering o’er the terrace’s balustrade, threw up its little head and sang as if to the myriads of 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 one without the other’s stirring with it.