other missive caught her eye.

"'Tis your ladyship's own," the lacquey explained somewhat anxiously.
"'Twas brought back, Sir John not having yet come home, and Jenfry having
waited three hours."

"'Twas long enough," quoth her ladyship. "'Twill do to-morrow."

She did not lay Osmonde's letter aside, but kept it in her hand, and
seeing that she waited for their retirement to read it, her guests began
to make their farewells. One by one or in groups of twos and threes they
left her, the men bowing low, and going away fretted by the memory of the
picture she made--a tall and regal figure in her flowered crimson, her
stateliness seeming relaxed and softened by the mere holding of the
sealed missive in her hand. But the women were vaguely envious, not of
Osmonde, but of her before whom there lay outspread as far as life's
horizon reached, a future of such perfect love and joy; for Gerald
Mertoun had been marked by feminine eyes since his earliest youth, and
had seemed to embody all that woman's dreams or woman's ambitions or her
love could desire.

When the last was gone, Clorinda turned, tore her letter open, and held
it hard to her lips. Before she read a word she kissed it passionately a
score of times, paying no heed that Anne sate gazing at her; and having
kissed it so, she fell to reading it, her cheeks warm with the glow of a
sweet and splendid passion, her bosom rising and falling in a tempest of
tender, fluttering breaths--and 'twas these words her eyes devoured:

"If I should head this page I write to you 'Goddess and Queen, and
Empress of my deepest soul,' what more should I be saying than 'My
Love' and 'My Clorinda,' since these express all the soul of man could
crave for or his body desire. The body and soul of me so long for
thee, sweetheart, and sweetest beautiful woman that the hand of Nature
ever fashioned for the joy of mortals, that I have had need to pray
Heaven's help to aid me to endure the passing of the days that lie
between me and the hour which will make me the most strangely,
rapturously, happy man, not in England, not in the world, but in all
God's universe. I must pray Heaven again, and indeed do and will, for
humbleness which shall teach me to remember that I am not deity, but
mere man--mere man--though I shall hold a goddess to my breast and
gaze into eyes which are like deep pools of Paradise, and yet answer
mine with the marvel of such lov