almost abject passion of adoration for her sister had grown as his
lordship's had, with every hour. For a season there had rested upon her
a black shadow beneath which she wept and trembled, bewildered and lost;
though even at its darkest the object of her humble love had been a star
whose brightness was not dimmed, because it could not be so whatsoever
passed before it. This cloud, however, being it seemed dispelled, the
star had shone but more brilliant in its high place, and she the more
passionately worshipped it. To sit apart and see her idol's radiance, to
mark her as she reigned and seemed the more royal when she bent the knee
to royalty itself, to see the shimmer of her jewels crowning her midnight
hair and crashing the warm whiteness of her noble neck, to observe the
admiration in all eyes as they dwelt upon her--this was, indeed, enough
of happiness.

"She is, as ever," she murmured, "not so much a woman as a proud lovely
goddess who has deigned to descend to earth. But my lord does not look
like himself. He seems shrunk in the face and old, and his eyes have
rings about them. I like not that. He is so kind a gentleman and so
happy that his body should not fail him. I have marked that he has
looked colourless for days, and Clorinda questioned him kindly on it, but
he said he suffered naught."

'Twas but a little later than she had thought this, that she remarked a
gentleman step aside and stand quite near without observing her. Feeling
that she had no testimony to her fancifulness, she found herself thinking
in a vague fashion that he, too, had come there because he chose to be
unobserved. 'Twould not have been so easy for him to retire as it had
been for her smallness and insignificance to do so; and, indeed, she did
not fancy that he meant to conceal himself, but merely to stand for a
quiet moment a little apart from the crowd.