ueen when
I depart? Ah, my mother--at least thou wilt love her! for verily, to
love my mother you have but to breathe the same air. Kiss me, Sibyll."

Kindness, of late, had been strange to Sibyll, especially from her own
sex, one of her own age; it came like morning upon the folded blossom.
She threw her arms round the new friend that seemed sent to her from
heaven; she kissed Anne's face and hands with grateful tears.

"Ah!" she said at last, when she could command a voice still broken with
emotion--"if I could ever serve--ever repay thee--though those gracious
words were the last thy lips should ever deign to address to me!"

Anne was delighted; she had never yet found one to protect; she had
never yet found one in whom thoroughly to confide. Gentle as her mother
was, the distinction between child and parent was, even in the fond
family she belonged to, so great in that day, that she could never have
betrayed to the countess the wild weakness of her young heart.

The wish to communicate, to reveal, is so natural to extreme youth, and
in Anne that disposition was so increased by a nature at once open and
inclined to lean on others, that she had, as we have seen, sought a
confidante in Isabel; but with her, even at the first, she found but
the half-contemptuous pity of a strong and hard mind; and lately, since
Edward's visit to Middleham, the Duchess of Clarence had been so rapt in
her own imperious egotism and discontented ambition, that the timid
Anne had not even dared to touch, with her, upon those secrets which it
flushed her own bashful cheek to recall. And this visit to the
court, this new, unfamiliar scene, this estrangement from all the old
accustomed affections, had produced in her that sense of loneliness
which is so irksome, till grave experience of real life accustoms us to
the common lot. So with the exaggerated and somewhat morbid sensibility
that belonged to her, she turned at once, and by impulse, to this
sudden, yet graceful friendship. Here was one of her own age, one who
had known sorrow, one whose voice and eyes charmed her, one who would
not chide even folly, one, above all, who had seen her beloved prince,
one associated with her fondest memories, one who might have a thousand
tales to tell of the day when the outlaw boy was a monarch's heir. In
the childishness of her soft years, she almost wept at another channel
for so much natural tenderness. It was half the woman gaining a
woman-friend, h