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"He is a man to mark, and I have a keen eye." She rose up as she
spoke, and stood before the fire, lifted by some strong feeling to
her fullest height, and towering there, splendid in the shadow--for
'twas by twilight they talked. "He is a Man," she said--"he is a
Man! Nay, he is as God meant man should be. And if men were so,
there would be women great enough for them to mate with and to give
the world men like them." And but that she stood in the shadow, her
lord would have seen the crimson torrent rush up her cheek and brow,
and overspread her long round throat itself.
If none other had known of it, there was one man who knew that she
had marked him, though she had borne herself towards him always with
her stateliest grace. This man was his Grace the Duke himself.
From the hour that he had stood transfixed as he watched her come up
the broad oak stair, from the moment that the red rose fell from her
wreath at his feet, and he had stooped to lift it in his hand, he
had seen her as no other man had seen her, and he had known that had
he not come but just too late, she would have been his own. Each
time he had beheld her since that night he had felt this burn more
deeply in his soul. He was too high and fine in all his thoughts to
say to himself that in her he saw for the first time the woman who
was his peer; but this was very truth--or might have been, if Fate
had set her youth elsewhere, and a lady who was noble and her own
mother had trained and guarded her. When he saw her at the Court
surrounded, as she ever was, by a court of her own; when he saw her
reigning in her lord's house, receiving and doing gracious honour to
his guests and hers; when she passed him in her coach, drawing every
eye by the majesty of her presence, as she drove through the town,
he felt a deep pang, which was all the greater that his honour bade
him conquer it. He had no ignoble thought of her, he would have
scorned to sully his soul with any light passion; to him she was the
woman who might have been his beloved wife and duchess, who would
have upheld with him the honour and traditions of his house, whose
strength and power and beauty would have been handed down to his
children, who so would have been born endowed with gifts befitting
the state to which Heaven had called them. It was of this he
thought when he saw her, and of naught less like to do her honour.
And as he had marked her so, he saw in her eyes, despite her dignity
and grace, she had marked him. He did not know how closely, or that
she gave him the attention he could not restrain himself from
bestowing upon her. But when he bowed before her, and she greeted
him with all courtesy, he saw in her great, splendid eye that had
Fate willed it so, she would have understood all his thoughts,
shared all his ambitions, and aided him to uphold his high ideals.
Nay, he knew she understood him even now, and was stirred by what
stirred him also, even though they met but rarely, and when they
encountered each other, spoke but as kinsman and kinswoman who would
show each other all gracious respect and honour. It was because of
this pang which struck his great heart at times that he was not a
frequent visitor at my Lord Dunstanwolde's mansion, but appeared
there only at such assemblies as were matters of ceremony, his
absence from which would have been a noted thing. His kinsman was
fond of him, and though himself of so much riper age, honoured him
greatly. At times he strove to lure him into visits of greater
familiarity; but though his kindness was never met coldly or
repulsed, a further intimacy was in some gracious way avoided.
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