wasting."

Anne rose from her chair and hurried to her sister's side, sinking upon
her knees there to kiss her hand.

"Sister," she said, "one could never dream that you could need pardon. I
love you so--that all you do, it seems to me must be right--whatsoever it
might be."

Clorinda drew her fair hands away and clasped them on the top of her
head, proudly, as if she crowned herself thereby, her great and splendid
eyes setting themselves upon her sister's face.

"All that I do," she said slowly, and with the steadfast high arrogance
of an empress' self--"All that I do _is_ right--for me. I make it so by
doing it. Do you think that I am conquered by the laws that other women
crouch and whine before, because they dare not break them, though they
long to do so? _I_ am my own law--and the law of some others."

It was by this time the first month of the summer, and to-night there was
again a birth-night ball, at which the beauty was to dazzle all eyes; but
'twas of greater import than the one she had graced previously, it being
to celebrate the majority of the heir to an old name and estate, who had
been orphaned early, and was highly connected, counting, indeed, among
the members of his family the Duke of Osmonde, who was one of the richest
and most envied nobles in Great Britain, his dukedom being of the oldest,
his numerous estates the most splendid and beautiful, and the long
history of his family full of heroic deeds. This nobleman was also a
distant kinsman to the Earl of Dunstanwolde, and at this ball, for the
first time for months, Sir John Oxon appeared again.