doubts. It was not thus I loved thee,
sweetheart. By all the saints in the calendar, had Henry V. or the Lion
Richard started from the tomb to forbid me thy hand, it would but have
made me a hotter lover! Howbeit Clarence shall decide ere the moon
wanes, and but for Isabel's tears and thy entreaties, my father's
grandchild should not have waited thus long the coming of so hesitating
a wooer. But lo, our darlings! Anne hath thine eyes, m'amie; and she
groweth more into my heart every day, since daily she more favours
thee."

While he thus spoke, the fair sisters came lightly and gayly up the
terrace: the arm of the statelier Isabel was twined round Anne's
slender waist; and as they came forward in that gentle link, with their
lithesome and bounding step, a happier blending of contrasted beauty was
never seen. The months that had passed since the sisters were presented
first to the reader had little changed the superb and radiant loveliness
of Isabel, but had added surprisingly to the attractions of Anne. Her
form was more rounded, her bloom more ripened; and though something of
timidity and bashfulness still lingered about the grace of her movements
and the glance of her dove-like eye, the more earnest thoughts of the
awakening woman gave sweet intelligence to her countenance, and that
divinest of all attractions--the touching and conscious modesty--to the
shy but tender smile, and the blush that so came and went, so went and
came, that it stirred the heart with a sort of delighted pity for one
so evidently susceptible to every emotion of pleasure and of pain. Life
seemed too rough a thing for so soft a nature, and gazing on her, one
sighed to guess her future.

"And what brings ye hither, young truants?" said the earl, as Anne,
leaving her sister, clung lovingly to his side (for it was ever her
habit to cling to some one), while Isabel kissed her mother's hand, and
then stood before her parents, colouring deeply, and with downcast eyes.
"What brings ye hither, whom I left so lately deep engaged in the loom,
upon the helmet of Goliath, with my burgonet before you as a sample?
Wife, you are to blame,--our rooms of state will be arrasless for the
next three generations, if these rosy fingers are suffered thus to play
the idlers."

"My father," whispered Anne, "guests are on their way hither,--a noble
cavalcade; you note them not from this part of the battlements, but from
our turret it was fair to see how their plumes