such as might be unveiled to it.  Neither was it that her cold courtesy and kind indifference roused him to call to the front any of the more valuable endowments of his being; something far better had commenced:  unconsciously to himself, the dim element of truth that flitted vaporous about in him had begun to respond to the great pervading and enrounding orb of her verity.  He began to respect her, began to feel drawn as if by another spiritual sense than that of which Amanda had laid hold.  He found in her an element of authority.  The conscious influences to whose triumph he had been so perniciously accustomed, had proved powerless upon her, while those that in her resided unconscious were subduing him.  Her star was dominant over his.

At length he began to be aware that this was no light preference, no passing fancy, but something more serious than he had hitherto known—­that in fact he was really, though uncomfortably and unsatisfactorily, in love with her.  He felt she was not like any other girl he had made his shabby love to, and would have tried to make beter to her, but she kept him at a distance, and that he began to find tormenting.  One day, for example, meeting her in the court as she was crossing towards the keep,—­

‘I would thou didst take apprentices, cousin,’ he said, ’so I might be one, and learn of thee the mysteries of thy trade.’

‘Wherefore, cousin?’

‘That I might spare thee something of thy labour.’

’That were no kindness.  I am not like thee; I find labour a thing to be courted rather than spared; I am not overwrought.’

Scudamore gazed into her grey eyes, but found there nothing to contradict, nothing to supplement the indifference of her words.  There was no lurking sparkle of humour, no acknowledgment of kindness.  There was a something, but he could not understand it, for his poor shapeless soul might not read the cosmic mystery embodied in their depths.  He stammered—­who had never known himself stammer before, broke the joints of an ill-fitted answer, swept the tiles with the long feather in his hat, and found himself parted from her, with the feeling that he had not of himself left her, but had been borne away by some subtle force emanating from her.

Lord Herbert had again left the castle.  More soldiers and more must still be raised for the king.  Now he would be paying his majesty a visit at Oxford, and inspecting the life-guards he had provided him, now back in South Wales, enlisting men, and straining every power in him to keep the district of which his father was governor in good affection and loyal behaviour.

Winter drew nigh, and stayed somewhat the rushx of events, clogged the wheels of life as they ran towards death, brought a little sleep to the world and coolness to men’s hearts—­led in another Christmas, and looked on for a while.