ind the least dull. In sooth, Nature had dealt
with both in a niggardly fashion, but Mistress Barbara was the plainer
and the more foolish. Mistress Anne had, perchance, the tenderer
feelings, and was in secret given to a certain sentimentality. She was
thin and stooping, and had but a muddy complexion; her hair was heavy, it
is true, but its thickness and weight seemed naught but an ungrateful
burden; and she had a dull, soft eye. In private she was fond of reading
such romances as she could procure by stealth from the library of books
gathered together in past times by some ancestor Sir Jeoffry regarded as
an idiot. Doubtless she met with strange reading in the volumes she took
to her closet, and her simple virgin mind found cause for the solving of
many problems; but from the pages she contrived to cull stories of lordly
lovers and cruel or kind beauties, whose romances created for her a
strange world of pleasure in the midst of her loneliness. Poor,
neglected young female, with every guileless maiden instinct withered at
birth, she had need of some tender dreams to dwell upon, though Fate
herself seemed to have decreed that they must be no more than visions.

It was, in sooth, always the beauteous Clorinda about whose charms she
builded her romances. In her great power she saw that for which knights
fought in tourney and great kings committed royal sins, and to her
splendid beauty she had in secrecy felt that all might be forgiven. She
cherished such fancies of her, that one morning, when she believed her
absent from the house, she stole into the corridor upon which Clorinda's
apartment opened. Her first timid thought had been, that if a chamber
door were opened she might catch a glimpse of some of the splendours her
sister's woman was surely laying out for her wearing at a birth-night
ball, at the house of one of the gentry of the neighbourhood. But it so
happened that she really found the door of entrance open, which, indeed,
she had not more than dared to hope, and finding it so, she stayed her
footsteps to gaze with beating heart within. On the great bed, which was
of carved oak and canopied with tattered tapestry, there lay spread such
splendours as she had never beheld near to before. 'Twas blue and silver
brocade Mistress Clorinda was to shine in to-night; it lay spread forth
in all its dimensions. The beautiful bosom and shoulders were to be
bared to the eyes of scores of adorers, but rich lace wa