gracious words were the last thy lips should ever deign to address to
me!"

Anne was delighted; she had never yet found one to protect; she had
never yet found one in whom thoroughly to confide. Gentle as her
mother was, the distinction between child and parent was, even in the
fond family she belonged to, so great in that day, that she could
never have betrayed to the countess the wild weakness of her young
heart.

The wish to communicate, to reveal, is so natural to extreme youth,
and in Anne that disposition was so increased by a nature at once open
and inclined to lean on others, that she had, as we have seen, sought
a confidante in Isabel; but with her, even at the first, she found but
the half-contemptuous pity of a strong and hard mind; and lately,
since Edward's visit to Middleham, the Duchess of Clarence had been so
rapt in her own imperious egotism and discontented ambition, that the
timid Anne had not even dared to touch, with her, upon those secrets
which it flushed her own bashful cheek to recall. And this visit to
the court, this new, unfamiliar scene, this estrangement from all the
old accustomed affections, had produced in her that sense of
loneliness which is so irksome, till grave experience of real life
accustoms us to the common lot. So with the exaggerated and somewhat
morbid sensibility that belonged to her, she turned at once, and by
impulse, to this sudden, yet graceful friendship. Here was one of her
own age, one who had known sorrow, one whose voice and eyes charmed
her, one who would not chide even folly, one, above all, who had seen
her beloved prince, one associated with her fondest memories, one who
might have a thousand tales to tell of the day when the outlaw boy was
a monarch's heir. In the childishness of her soft years, she almost