ring on his breast--the one who had started
at sight of her as she had reached the landing of the stairs. He held
still in his hand a broken red rose, and when his eye fell on her crown
the colour mounted to his cheek.

"My honoured kinsman, his Grace the Duke of Osmonde," said her affianced
lord. "Your Grace--it is this lady who is to do me the great honour of
becoming my Lady Dunstanwolde."

And as the deep, tawny brown eye of the man bending before her flashed
into her own, for the first time in her life Mistress Clorinda's lids
fell, and as she swept her curtsey of stately obeisance her heart struck
like a hammer against her side.

CHAPTER IX--"I give to him the thing he craves with all his soul--myself"

In a month she was the Countess of Dunstanwolde, and reigned in her
lord's great town house with a retinue of servants, her powdered lackeys
among the tallest, her liveries and equipages the richest the world of
fashion knew. She was presented at the Court, blazing with the
Dunstanwolde jewels, and even with others her bridegroom had bought in
his passionate desire to heap upon her the magnificence which became her
so well. From the hour she knelt to kiss the hand of royalty she set the
town on fire. It seemed to have been ordained by Fate that her passage
through this world should be always the triumphant passage of a
conqueror. As when a baby she had ruled the servants' hall, the kennel,
and the grooms' quarters, later her father and his boisterous friends,
and from her fifteenth birthday the whole hunting shire she lived in, so
she held her sway in the great world, as did no other lady of her rank or
any higher. Those of her age seemed but girls yet by her side, whether
married or unmarried, and howsoever trained to modish ways. She was but
scarce eighteen at her marriage, but she was no girl, nor did she look
one, glowing as was the early splendour of her bloom. Her height was far
beyond the ordinary for a woman; but her shape so faultless and her
carriage so regal, that though there were men upon whom she was tall
enough to look down with ease, the beholder but felt that her tallness
was an added grace and beauty with which all women should have been
endowed, and which, as they were not, caused them to appear but
insignificant. What a throat her diamonds blazed on, what shoulders and
bosom her laces framed, on what a brow her coronet sat and glittered. Her
lord lived as 'twere upon his kn