had defied ancient custom and forbidden his limbs and body to be bound—­that at three months he was as big and strong as an infant of half a year.  ’Twas plain he was built for a tall man with broad shoulders and noble head.  But a few months had passed before his baby features modelled themselves into promise of marked beauty, and his brown eyes gazed back at human beings, not with infant vagueness, but with a look which had in it somewhat of question and reply.  His retinue of serving-women were filled with such ardent pride in him that his chief nurse had much to do to keep the peace among them, each wishing to be first with him, and being jealous of another who made him laugh and crow and stretch forth his arms that she might take him.  The Commandress-in-Chief of the nurses was no ordinary female.  She was the widow of a poor chaplain—­her name Mistress Rebecca Halsell—­and she gratefully rejoiced to have had the happiness to fall into a place of such honour and responsibility.  She was of sober age, and being motherly as well as discreet, kept such faithful watch over him as few children begin life under.

The figure of this good woman throughout his childhood stood out from among all others surrounding him, with singular distinctness.  She seemed not like a servant, nor was she like any other in the household.  As he ripened in years, he realised that in his earliest memories of her there was a recollection of a certain grave respect she had seemed to pay him, and he saw it had been not mere deference but respect, as though he had been a man in miniature, and one to whom, despite his tender youth, dignity and reason should be qualities of nature, and therefore might be demanded from him in all things.  As early as thought began to form itself clearly in him, he singled out Mistress Halsell as a person to reflect upon.  When he was too young to know wherefore, he comprehended vaguely that she was of a world to which the rest of his attendants did not belong.  ’Twas not that she was of greatly superior education and manners, since all those who waited upon him had been carefully chosen; ’twas that she seemed to love him more gravely than did the others, and to mean a deeper thing when she called him “my lord Marquess.”  She was a pock-marked woman (she having taken the disease from her late husband the Chaplain, who had died of that scourge), and in her earliest bloom could have been but plainly favoured.  She had a large-boned frame, and but for a good and serious carriage would have seemed awkward.  She had, however, the good fortune to be the possessor of a mellow voice, and to have clear grey eyes, set well and deep in her head, and full of earnest meaning.

“Her I shall always remember,” the young Marquess often said when he had grown to be a man and was Duke, and had wife and children of his own.  “I loved to sit upon her knee, and lean against her breast, and gaze up into her eyes.  ’Twas my child-fancy that there was deep within them something like a star, and when I gazed at it, I felt a kind of loving awe such as grew within me when I lay and looked up at a star in the sky.”