“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 her pug dogs to walk, her wardrobe, and jewels, and equipages, were each and all marvels to her, but seemed to her mind so far befitting that she remembered, wondering, the days when she had darned the tattered tapestry in her chamber, and changed the ribbands and fashions of her gowns.  Being now attired fittingly, though soberly as became her, she was not in these days—­at least, as far as outward seeming went—­an awkward blot upon the scene when she appeared among her sister’s company; but at heart she was as timid and shrinking as ever, and never mingled with the guests in the great rooms when she could avoid so doing.  Once or twice she went forth with Clorinda in her coach and six, and saw the glittering world, while she drew back into her corner of the equipage and gazed with all a country-bred woman’s timorous admiration.