as could be awakened but by a being of as
strong and deep a nature as itself, one who was in all things its peer.

"I have been lonely--lonely all my life," my Lady Dunstanwolde had once
said to her sister, and she had indeed spoken a truth.

Even in her childhood she had felt in some strange way she stood apart
from the world about her. Before she had been old enough to reason she
had been conscious that she was stronger and had greater power and
endurance than any human being about her. Her strength she used in these
days in wilful tyranny, and indeed it was so used for many a day when she
was older. The time had never been when an eye lighted on her with
indifference, or when she could not rule and punish as she willed. As an
infant she had browbeaten the women-servants and the stable-boys and
grooms; but because of her quick wit and clever tongue, and also because
no humour ever made her aught but a creature well worth looking at, they
had taken her bullying in good-humour and loved her in their coarse way.
She had tyrannised over her father and his companions, and they had
adored and boasted of her; but there had not been one among them whom she
could have turned to if a softer moment had come upon her and she had
felt the need of a friend, nor indeed one whom she did not regard
privately with contempt.

A god or goddess forced upon earth and surrounded by mere human beings
would surely feel a desolateness beyond the power of common words to
express, and a human being endowed with powers and physical gifts so rare
as to be out of all keeping with those of its fellows of ordinary build
and mental stature must needs be lonely too.

She had had no companion, because she had found none like herself, and
none with whom she could have aught in common. Anne she had pitied,
being struck by some sense of the unfairness of her lot as compared with
her own. John Oxon had moved her, bringing to her her first knowledge of
buoyant, ardent youth, and blooming strength and beauty; for Dunstanwolde
she had felt gratitude and affection; but than these there had been no
others who even distantly had touched her heart.

The night she had given her promise to Dunstanwolde, and had made her
obeisance before his kinsman as she had met his deep and leonine eye, she
had known that 'twas the only man's eye before which her own would fall
and which held the power to rule her very soul.

She did not think this as a romantic girl wo