No!" he added, with a sarcastic quiver of his lip--"no; what stings
and galls the Lady of Harrington and Bonville, what makes her
countenance change in my presence, and her voice sharpen at my accost,
is plainly this: in wedding her dull lord and rejecting me, Katherine
Nevile deemed she wedded power and rank and station; and now, while we
are both young, how proves her choice? The Lord of Harrington and
Bonville is so noted a dolt, that even the Neviles cannot help him to
rise,--the meanest office is above his mind's level; and, dragged down
by the heavy clay to which her wings are yoked, Katherine, Lady of
Harrington and Bonville--oh, give her her due titles!--is but a
pageant figure in the court. If the war-trump blew, his very vassals
would laugh at a Bonville's banner, and beneath the flag of poor
William Hastings would gladly march the best chivalry of the land.
And this it is, I say, that galls her. For evermore she is driven to
compare the state she holds as the dame of the accepted Bonville with
that she lost as the wife of the disdained Hastings."

And if, in the heat and passion that such words betrayed, Sibyll
sighed to think that something of the old remembrance yet swelled and
burned, they but impressed her more with the value of a heart in which
the characters once writ endured so long, and roused her to a tender
ambition to heal and to console.

Then looking into her own deep soul, Sibyll beheld there a fund of
such generous, pure, and noble affection, such reverence as to the
fame, such love as to the man, that she proudly felt herself worthier
of Hastings than the haughty Katherine. She entered then, as it were,
the lists with this rival,--a memory rather, so she thought, than a
corporeal being; and her eye grew brighter, her step statelier, in the
excitement of the contest, the anticipation of the triumph. For what