town on fire. It seemed to have been ordained by Fate that her passage
through this world should be always the triumphant passage of a
conqueror. As when a baby she had ruled the servants' hall, the kennel,
and the grooms' quarters, later her father and his boisterous friends,
and from her fifteenth birthday the whole hunting shire she lived in, so
she held her sway in the great world, as did no other lady of her rank or
any higher. Those of her age seemed but girls yet by her side, whether
married or unmarried, and howsoever trained to modish ways. She was but
scarce eighteen at her marriage, but she was no girl, nor did she look
one, glowing as was the early splendour of her bloom. Her height was far
beyond the ordinary for a woman; but her shape so faultless and her
carriage so regal, that though there were men upon whom she was tall
enough to look down with ease, the beholder but felt that her tallness
was an added grace and beauty with which all women should have been
endowed, and which, as they were not, caused them to appear but
insignificant. What a throat her diamonds blazed on, what shoulders and
bosom her laces framed, on what a brow her coronet sat and glittered. Her
lord lived as 'twere upon his knees in enraptured adoration. Since his
first wife's death in his youth, he had dwelt almost entirely in the
country at his house there, which was fine and stately, but had been kept
gloomily half closed for a decade. His town establishment had, in truth,
never been opened since his bereavement; and now--an elderly man--he
returned to the gay world he had almost forgotten, with a bride whose
youth and beauty set it aflame. What wonder that his head almost reeled
at times and that he lost his breath before the sum of his strange late
bliss, and the new lease of brilliant life which seemed to have been
given to him.

In the days when, while in the country, he had heard such rumours of the
lawless days of Sir Jeoffry Wildairs' daughter, when he had heard of her