She reflected with
bitterness that for a matter of seven or eight years of waiting, and a
turn of chance which would have meant happiness instead of misery, she
might have had the widowed Sir Arnold for a husband and have been the
Archbishop of Canterbury's cousin, high in favour with the winning side
in the civil war and united to a man who would have known how to
flatter her cold nature into a fiction of feeling, instead of wasting
on her the almost exaggerated respect with which a noble passion
envelops its object, but which, to most women, becomes in the end
unspeakably wearisome.
Many a time during those six years had she and Sir Arnold met and
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.
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