“Thou wast given me, sister,” said Anne.  “Thou hast given me a home and kindness such as I never dared to hope; thou hast been like a great star to me—­I have had none other, and I thank Heaven on my knees each night for the brightness my star has shed on me.”

“Poor Anne, dear Anne!” Clorinda said, laying her arms about her and kissing her.  “Pray for thy star, good, tender Anne, that its light may not be quenched.”  Then with a sudden movement her hand was pressed upon her bosom again.  “Ah, Anne,” she cried, and in the music of her voice, agony itself was ringing—­“Anne, there is but one thing on this earth God rules over—­but one thing that belongs—­belongs to me; and ’tis Gerald Mertoun—­and he is mine and shall not be taken from me, for he is a part of me, and I a part of him!”

“He will not be,” said Anne—­“he will not.”

“He cannot,” Clorinda answered—­“he shall not!  ’Twould not be human.”

She drew a long breath and was calm again.

“Did it reach your ears,” she said, reclasping a band of jewels on her arm, “that John Oxon had been offered a place in a foreign Court, and that ’twas said he would soon leave England?”

“I heard some rumour of it,” Anne answered, her emotion getting the better of her usual discreet speech.  “God grant it may be true!”

“Ay!” said Clorinda, “would God that he were gone!”

But that he was not, for when she entered the assembly that night he was standing near the door as though he lay in waiting for her, and his eyes met hers with a leaping gleam, which was a thing of such exultation that to encounter it was like having a knife thrust deep into her side and through and through it, for she knew full well that he could not wear such a look unless he had some strength of which she knew not.

This gleam was in his eyes each time she found herself drawn to them, and it seemed as though she could look nowhere without encountering his gaze.  He followed her from room to room, placing himself where she could not lift her eyes without beholding him; when she walked a minuet with a royal duke, he stood and watched her with such a look in his face as drew all eyes towards him.

“’Tis as if he threatens her,” one said.  “He has gone mad with disappointed love.”

But ’twas not love that was in his look, but the madness of long-thwarted passion mixed with hate and mockery; and this she saw, and girded her soul with all its strength, knowing that she had a fiercer beast to deal with, and a more vicious and dangerous one, than her horse Devil.  That he kept at first at a distance from her, and but looked on with this secret exultant glow in his bad, beauteous eyes, told her that at last he felt he held some power in his hands, against which all her defiance would be as naught.  Till this hour, though she had suffered, and when alone had writhed in agony of grief and bitter shame, in his presence she had never flinched.  Her strength she knew was greater than his; but his baseness was his weapon, and the depths of that baseness she knew she had never reached.