; in a few moments he was extending his attention to Lady Mary
Denbigh, who leaned forward with an exalted expression shaded by
ringlets, raising her imperceptible bosom with an eloquent sigh. By
this time Lord Hunsdon was talking into Anne's ear and she could hear
nothing of the conversation opposite, although now and again she
caught a syllable from a low toneless voice. But his first agony was
passed as well as her own, and she endeavoured to forget him in her
swain's comments upon the political news arrived with the packet that
afternoon. When tea was over and Miss Bargarny, who cultivated
liveliness of manner, had engaged the poet in a discussion upon the
relative merits of Shelley and Nathaniel P. Willis--astonishingly
original on her part, mild to the outposts of indifference on
his--Anne followed Hunsdon to the other side of the room to look over
an album of his mother's, just unpacked. It contained calotypes of the
most distinguished men and women of the day, and Anne, who had barely
seen a daguerreotype before, and never a presentment of the famous
people of her time, became so absorbed that she forgot the poet to
whose spirit hers had been wedded these five years, and whose visible
part had sickened the very depths of her being. Lord Hunsdon had the
pleasure of watching her kindling eyes as he told her personal details
of each of his friends, and when Anne cried out that she was living in
a bit of contemporary history, he too flushed, and felt that his suit
prospered. But Anne was thinking as little of him as of Warner, and so
intent was she upon the ugly striking physiognomy of the author of
"Venetia," with his Byronic curls and flowing collar, that she was
hardly aware that Lord Hunsdon's attentions had been claimed by his
mother; who skilfully transferred him to the side of Lady Mary.

A moment later she turned abruptly and met the eyes of Warner. He
was sitting apart, and he was staring at her. It was not meeting his
eyes so suddenly that turned her hands to ice and made them shake as
she returned to the album, but the eyes themselves that looked out
from the ruin of his face. She had expected them to be sneering,
lascivious, bold, anything but what they were: the most spiritual and
at the same time the most tormented eyes that had ever been set in
the face of a mortal. She caught her breath. What could it mean? No
man could live the life he had lived--Lady Mary, who had a fine turn
for gossip, had told h