talked as on the first night. Once, when the Empress Maud had taken
King Stephen prisoner, and things looked ill for his followers, Warde
had insisted that his neighbour should come over to Stoke Regis, as
being a safer place than his own castle; and once again, when Stephen
had the upper hand, and Sir Raymond was fighting desperately under
Gloucester, his wife had taken her son, and the priest, and some of her
women, and had ridden over to ask protection of Sir Arnold, leaving the
manor to take care of itself.

At first Curboil had constantly professed admiration for Warde's mental
and physical gifts; but little by little, tactfully feeling his
distance, he had made the lady meet his real intention half way by
confiding to him all that she suffered, or fancied that she suffered--
which with some women is the same thing--in being bound for life to a
man who had failed to give her what her ambition craved. Then, one day,
the key-word had been spoken. After that, they never ceased to hope
that Raymond Warde might come to an untimely end.

During these years Gilbert had grown from a boy to a man, unsuspicious,
worshipping his mother as a kind of superior being, but loving his
father with all that profound instinct of mutual understanding which
makes both love and hatred terrible within the closer degrees of
consanguinity. As time went by and the little Beatrix grew tall and
straight and pale, Gilbert loved her quite naturally, as she loved
him--two young people of one class, without other companions, and very
often brought together for days at a time in the isolated existence of
mediaeval castles. Perhaps Gilbert never realized just how much of his
affection for his mother was the result of her willingness to let him
fall in love with Beatrix. But the possibility of discussing the
marriage was another excuse for those long conversations with Sir