thy favourite, Anne," lightly, and she delicately spurned the blackened
tinder with her foot--"thy favourite, John Oxon."

Mistress Anne crouched in her seat and hid her face in her thin hands.

"Oh, my lady!" she cried, not feeling that she could say "sister," "if he
be base, and ever was so, pity him, pity him! The base need pity more
than all."

For she had loved him madly, all unknowing her own passion, not presuming
even to look up in his beautiful face, thinking of him only as the slave
of her sister, and in dead secrecy knowing strange things--strange
things! And when she had seen the letter she had known the handwriting,
and the beating of her simple heart had well-nigh strangled her--for she
had seen words writ by him before.

* * * * *

When Dunstanwolde and his lady went back to their house in town, Mistress
Anne went with them. Clorinda willed that it should be so. She made her
there as peaceful and retired a nest of her own as she had given to her
at Dunstanwolde. By strange good fortune Barbara had been wedded to a
plain gentleman, who, being a widower with children, needed a help-meet
in his modest household, and through a distant relationship to Mistress
Wimpole, encountered her charge, and saw in her meekness of spirit the
thing which might fall into the supplying of his needs. A beauty or a
fine lady would not have suited him; he wanted but a housewife and a
mother for his orphaned children, and this, a young woman who had lived
straitly, and been forced to many contrivances for mere decency of
apparel and ordinary comfort, might be trained to become.