are but women, naught but women."

"You have marked him well," said her lord, admiring her wisdom. "Methinks
that you--though you have spoken to him but little, and have but of late
become his kinswoman--have marked and read him better than the rest of
us."

"Yes--I have marked him," was her answer.

"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