were few kings' houses as stately and beauteous in
their proportions as was this one.

The fairest room in the fair house had ever been the one known as her
Grace's White Chamber. 'Twas a spacious room with white panelled walls
and large mullioned windows looking forth over green hill and vale and
purple woodland melting into the blue horizon. The ivy grew thick about
the windows, and birds nested therein and twittered tenderly in their
little homes. The Duchess greatly loved the sound, as she did the
fragrance of flowers with which the air of the White Chamber was ever
sweet, and which was wafted up to it by each wandering breeze from the
flower-beds blooming on the terrace below.

In this room--as the bells in the church tower rang their joyous
peal--her young Grace lay in her great bed, her new-born child on her
arm and her lord seated close to her pillow, holding her little hand
to his lips, his lashes somewhat moist as he hung over his treasures.

"You scarce can believe that he is here," the Duchess whispered with a
touching softness. "Indeed, I scarce believe it myself. 'Twas not fair
of him to keep us waiting five years when we so greatly yearned for his
coming. Perhaps he waited, knowing that we expected so much from
him--such beauty and such wisdom and such strength. Let us look at him
together, love. The physician will order you away from me soon, but let
us see first how handsome he is."

She thrust the covering aside and the two heads--one golden and one
brown--pressed closer together that they might the better behold the
infant charms which were such joy to them.

"I would not let them bind his little limbs and head as is their way,"
she said. "From the first hour I spoke with his chief nurse, I gave her
my command that he should be left free to grow and to kick his pretty
legs as soon as he was strong enough. See, John, he stirs them a little
now. They say he is of wondrous size and long and finely made, and
indeed he seems so to me--and 'tis not only because I am so proud, is
it?"

"I know but little of their looks when they are so young, sweet," her
lord answered, his voice and eyes as tender as her own; for in sooth he
felt himself moved as he had been at no other hour in his life before,
though he was a man of a nature as gentle as 'twas strong. "I will own
that I had ever thought of them as strange, unbeauteous red things a
man almost held in fear, and whose ugliness a woman but loved because