ind favour with Lord Hunsdon. But she was seldom far from
Anne Percy, whose propinquity he could enjoy even if debarred
communion. And Lady Mary frequently made Anne the theme of her
remarks, in entertaining the poet; whose covert admiration she too
detected and encouraged, although not without resentment. Miss Percy
was undeniably handsome and high-born, but alas, quite lacking in
fashion, in style, in _ton_. Not that Lady Mary despaired of her. If
she could be persuaded to pass three seasons in London, divorced from
that stranded corner of England where she had spent twenty-two long
years, all her new friends felt quite hopeful that she would yet do
them credit and become a young lady of the highest fashion. Her figure
was really good, if somewhat Amazonian, and her face, if not quite
regular--with those black eyebrows as wide as one's finger, and that
square chin, when all the beauties had oval contours and delicate
arches above limpid eyes--was, as she had before maintained,
singularly striking and handsome, and if perhaps too warmly coloured,
this was not held to be a fault by some.

Warner recalled the bitter-sweet of her babble as he heard her sigh
gently beside him, her long golden ringlets shading her bent face. His
eyes wandered, after their habit, to Anne Percy, who sat across the
church, distinguished in that gay throng by bonnet and gloves and gown
of immaculate white. He worshipped every irregular line in that noble,
impulsive, passionate face and wondered that he had ever thought
another woman beautiful; condemned his imagination that it had lacked
the wit to conceive a like combination. Her eyes, commonly full of
laughter, he had seen darken with anger and melt with tenderness.
There were moments when she looked so strong as momentarily to isolate
herself from normal womanhood, and suggest unlimited if unsuspected
powers of good or evil; but those were fleeting impressions; as a rule
she looked the most completely human woman he had ever known.

He sighed and looked away. A wave of superlative bitterness shook him,
but he was too just to curse life, or anyone but himself. He did not
even curse the worthless woman who had struck the curb from his
inherited weakness and made him a slave instead of a rigid and
insolent master. She had been no worse, hardly more captivating, than
a thousand other women, but she had appealed powerfully to his
poetical imagination, and he had elevated her into the sovereignsh