"No," said Anne; "you--are so--so crimson and splendid--and I--" Her ladyship came swiftly down the stairs to her. "You are not crimson and splendid," she said. "'Tis you who are a ghost. What is it?" Anne let her soft, dull eyes rest upon her for a moment helplessly, and when she replied her voice sounded weak. "I think--I am ill, sister," she said. "I seem to tremble and feel faint." "Go then to bed and see the physician. You must be cared for," said her ladyship. "In sooth, you look ill indeed." "Nay," said Anne; "I beg you, sister, this afternoon let me be with you; it will sustain me. You are so strong--let me--" She put out her hand as if to touch her, but it dropped at her side as though its strength was gone. "But there will be many babbling people," said her sister, with a curious look. "You do not like company, and these days my rooms are full. 'Twill irk and tire you." "I care not for the people--I would be with you," Anne said, in strange imploring. "I have a sick fancy that I am afraid to sit alone in my chamber. 'Tis but weakness. Let me this afternoon be with you." "Go then and change your robe," said Clorinda, "and put some red upon your cheeks. You may come if you will. You are a strange creature, Anne." And thus saying, she passed into her apartment. As there are blows and pain which end in insensibility or delirium, so there are catastrophes and perils which are so great as to produce something near akin to these. As she had stood before her mirror in her chamber watching her reflection, while her woman attired her in her crimson flowered satin and builded up her stately head-dress, this other woman had felt that the hour when she could have shrieked and raved and betrayed herself had passed by, and left a deadness like a calm behind, as though horror had stunned all pain and yet left her senses clear. She forgot not the thing which lay staring upward blankly at the under part of the couch which hid it--the look of its fixed eyes, its outspread locks, and the purple indentation on the temple she saw as clearly as she had seen them in that first mad moment when she had stood staring downward at the thing itself; but the coursing of her blood was stilled, the gallop of her pulses, and that wild hysteric leaping of her heart into her throat, choking her and forcing her to gasp and pant in that way which in women must ever end in shrieks and cries and sobbing beatings of the air. But for the feminine softness to which her nature had given way for the first time, since the power of love had mastered her, there was no thing of earth could have happened to her which would have brought this rolling ball to her throat, this tremor to her body--since the hour of her birth she had never been attacked by such a female folly, as she would indeed have regarded it once; but now 'twas different--for a while she had been a woman--a woman who had flung herself upon the bosom of him who was her soul's lord, and