"

"Yes--I have marked him," was her answer.

"He is a man to mark, and I have a keen eye." She rose up as she spoke,
and stood before the fire, lifted by some strong feeling to her fullest
height, and towering there, splendid in the shadow--for 'twas by twilight
they talked. "He is a Man," she said--"he is a Man! Nay, he is as God
meant man should be. And if men were so, there would be women great
enough for them to mate with and to give the world men like them." And
but that she stood in the shadow, her lord would have seen the crimson
torrent rush up her cheek and brow, and overspread her long round throat
itself.

If none other had known of it, there was one man who knew that she had
marked him, though she had borne herself towards him always with her
stateliest grace. This man was his Grace the Duke himself. From the
hour that he had stood transfixed as he watched her come up the broad oak
stair, from the moment that the red rose fell from her wreath at his
feet, and he had stooped to lift it in his hand, he had seen her as no
other man had seen her, and he had known that had he not come but just
too late, she would have been his own. Each time he had beheld her since
that night he had felt this burn more deeply in his soul. He was too
high and fine in all his thoughts to say to himself that in her he saw
for the first time the woman who was his peer; but this was very truth--or
might have been, if Fate had set her youth elsewhere, and a lady who was
noble and her own mother had trained and guarded her. When he saw her at
the Court surrounded, as she ever was, by a court of her own; when he saw
her reigning in her lord's house, receiving and doing gracious honour to
his guests and hers; when she passed him in her coach, drawing every eye
by the majesty of her presence, as she drove through the town, he felt a
deep pang, which was all the greater that his honour bade him conquer it.
He had no ignoble thought of her, he would have scorned to sully his soul
with any light passion; to him she was the woman who might have been his
beloved wife and duchess, who would have upheld with him the honour and
traditions of his house, whose strength and power and beauty would have
been handed down to his children, who so would have been born endowed
with gifts befitting the state to which Heaven had called them. It was
of this he thought when he saw her, and of naught less like to do her
honour. And as he had marke